


Scattered Gears

by I_Just_Write



Category: DOOM - Fandom, Harry Potter - Fandom, Mass Effect Trilogy, Multi-Fandom, Outer Wilds (Video Game), Star Wars, Terminator (Movies), Titan of Steel, Worm - Fandom
Genre: Magitech, Nuclear Weapons, OC insert, Other, Robots, Total Canon Derailment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 22
Words: 38,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26683075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Just_Write/pseuds/I_Just_Write
Summary: In the wake of the Battle of the Hellrift and the ensuing dimensional crash, countless Clockwork Knights were scattered across the multiverse. Built to be unstoppable engines of heroism, these machines find themselves far from home and needing to adapt to new circumstances. This is their story.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	1. Earth Bet 1

(POV: Near Third Person)  
  
The transition was extremely abrupt. One moment, Clockwork Knight Catherine was blasting away at Daemons with her omni-rifle in Nuclear Smite mode, the protonium-powered weapon erasing targets with blasts of c-fractional plasma enchanted with Holy-theme Mana. Then the Titan of Steel entered the Hellrift and sent the command to pulse all dimensional jammers. The next thing the war machine knew, she was falling off a rooftop. Only her superhuman reaction times allowed her to stop firing before she accidentally killed several civilians, then arrest her fall with minimal damage to the pavement.  
  
As Catherine pulled herself to her feet, it quickly became apparent that she was in a settlement of some description, though she didn't yet know whether to categorize it as a town or a city. It was also immediately apparent that she wasn't anywhere near home; the gravity was heavier by a couple percentage points, the sun's emission spectra were slightly different, and the Mana Thematograph was detecting absolutely no magic in use aside from what Catherine herself was radiating. Also, the general response among the locals was somewhere between running in terror or warily staring, indicating minimal familiarity with Clockworks.  
  
Not wasting time on assuming the locals would understand Amal without translation, Catherine immediately activated Words of Truth as she stowed her omni-rifle. This used a sizable amount of Holy-theme Mana to render all communication in her immediate proximity understood by all present, with the side effect of rendering falsehood impossible. That done, she spoke "I mean no-one here any harm. All evidence indicates that I have been displaced across realities. Information regarding where I am would be greatly appreciated."  
  
There was an awkward pause as Catherine noticed several people 'discretely' retrieving some variety of radio communication device, the intercepted signals indicating that some agency by the name of the "Parahuman Response Team" was being contacted. Either way, Catherine figured that said agency would at the very least inform her more about where she wound up. Worst case, they tried to arrest her, and she learned that the authorities here were incredibly tyrannical and in dire need of removal.  
  
Before that could happen, one of the adolescent men in the crowd stepped up and said "So, this is Ellisburg. We're part of the United States of America, and we're on Earth Bet. Where are you from?"  
  
Immediately, Catherine made a very slight bow as she didn't actually have the correct neck muscles to nod, before noting "I am Clockwork Knight Catherine. I'm from the Socialist Republic of Amali on Terra Magnus. I was involved in fighting off an extradimensional invasion at the Battle of the Hellrift, which resulted in my displacement."  
  
The group who was still making use of their digital radios continued to relay this information. A few minutes later, a van pulled into view, with the letters "P R T" marking the side along with a logo. Figuring that this would be the local authorities making their presence known, Catherine waved as the van slowed to a stop. Soon enough a few humans wearing tactical gear got out of the back of the vehicle, which Catherine wouldn't begrudge them.  
  
A couple seconds later, the group of troopers were standing around Catherine, before one of the women present introduced herself with "I'm Rachel Ferris with the Parahuman Response Team. I'm here to find out what you're doing, who you are, and what if any plans you might have."  
  
Catherine wasn't equipped for a shrug, so she simply elevated her sensor turret slightly before replying "I am Clockwork Knight Catherine, one of millions of Clockwork Knights manufactured by the Socialist Republic of Amali. I was a nurse prior to getting called up for military duty, and I was attached to the Amali military immediately prior to the Battle of the Hellrift. Forcing the rift closed seems to have caused an unexpected dimensional shift; both the local gravity and stellar emission spectra are slightly different than those experienced on Terra Magnus. At the moment I don't really have any plans due to lack of information, though I am heavily inclined toward the protection of innocent people. Perhaps I might look into being certified for medical duties here."  
  
Looking distinctly bemused, Rachel asked "Were you built like that during your time as a nurse? You seem like you'd have a rather intimidating bedside manner."  
  
Humming a bit, Catherine responded "Yes; when I was manufactured I opted for non-military government employment, which allowed me to keep my Knight-class chassis and equipment. On occasion it was needed to put down a threat to my patients. Opting for a civilian lifestyle would have resulted in me being transferred into a Mediator-class chassis; while certainly more expressive, I would have been far less empowered to actually help people."  
  
After a few moments, Rachel seemed to pick up on something as she noted "You're not speaking English are you? Now that I'm actually focusing on your words, they aren't lining up remotely with what you're actually _saying_. What gives?"  
  
Immediately, Catherine replied "I have Words of Truth active at the moment. It's a spell that renders all communication in my vicinity understood by all parties present; as a side-effect it renders deliberate falsehood effectively impossible as enough subtext is transmitted to render such attempts self-defeating. Maintaining this effect is a significant draw on my power plant, meaning that learning English for real would be highly desirable."  
  
This is one of the other PRT agents spoke up, saying "Magic isn't real! You can't seriously be saying you're using actual magic to translate for you."  
  
Catherine replied "Well, a lack of local magic would certainly be consistent with the effectively null readings from my Mana Thematograph. Still, I assure you that magic is real, I am using it now, and much of my inner workings are based on it."  
  
That's when everyone heard panicked screaming from up the street, rapidly turning to look. What they saw was a group of monsters grabbing panicked civilians and hauling them off to some doubtless unpleasant fate. That said, they didn't get very far, as Catherine teleported into close combat range with the creatures and immediately dismembered them with her broadsword.  


* * *

(POV: Clockwork Knight Catherine)  
As I made the final cut on the group of monsters who had been busily kidnapping civilians, I immediately directed them "Quick, safety's that way!" while gesturing towards where the PRT agents were waiting. That done, I whirled around to check for more monsters, quickly finding another group of creatures pursuing a bunch of fleeing civilians. I didn't give them a chance, nearly instantly lifting my right arm and opening fire with my integrated gun in bullet mode, sending a burst of hypervelocity projectiles downrange and near-instantly pasting the group. The civilians kept running, which was honestly a good move given the circumstances.  
  
As I advanced, I activated my backup radio transceiver, copying the dial sequence I'd noticed earlier to reach the Parahuman Response Team. After a brief period, someone accepted the connection and I immediately channeled Words of Truth through the transmission as I stated "Greetings. I am Clockwork Knight Catherine, currently located in Ellisburg. I am temporarily seconding myself to your agency as a combat asset. There are monsters of unknown origin attacking civilians, and I wish to combat this threat as effectively as possible."  
  
As I said that I was already busily gunning down another group of hostiles. Whoever was on the other end started talking to someone else for a moment, before he replied "Understood, I'll transfer you to console immediately."  
  
A few moments later, a gruff-sounding but vaguely feminine voice answered, saying "Catherine, was it? What's your situation and general capabilities?"  
  
Immediately, I answered "I don't know how to navigate Ellisburg and I'm trying to protect civilians from monster attacks. As for capabilities, I'm a combat automaton strong enough to rip an armored vehicle in half unarmed, I can run at around ninety miles per hour, teleport with a range of fifty meters, jam interdimensional travel, withstand multiple tons of high explosives without significant damage, self-repair, and I've got a mix of integrated and modular weaponry that effectively amounts to unlimited firepower up to the tactical nuke level, with near-flawless accuracy. There are a few other things I can do, but they aren't immediately relevant."  
  
There was a brief pause on the other end as I mowed down another group of creatures, before eventually the dispatcher replied "Understood. I'll try and guide you to where your assistance is needed most."  
  
I replied in the affirmative and kept fighting for the next two hours with no support aside from comms, single-handedly routing thousands of these creatures and rescuing civilians left and right. As I'd fought, I'd also conversed with Jessica over the communication channel, learning what exactly a Parahuman was among other things. Personally, I found the idea rather ridiculous and more than a little suspicious, since there was no apparent cause for their empowerment. That said, Jessica found the idea of Adventurers being empowered by exposure to high levels of Mana rather ridiculous, so there was that. I'd also been gradually turning down the power on Words of Truth to properly learn English as I chatted, the translation spell finding excellent use as a teaching aid.  
  
Either way, two hours in is when Jessica informed me "Good news. All the teams have retreated to the perimeter and are keeping any monsters from escaping. Also as far as we can tell all the civilians either left or got eaten already. You've finally got clearance to use that heavy ordnance of yours, just don't torch the perimeter."  
  
I replied in a pleased tone "I thought you'd never ask!" and immediately switched my omni-rifle into Proton Beam mode. After all, the only reason I hadn't outright killed the Parahuman responsible for this mess yet was because I couldn't find him. Now that I had heavy ordnance clearance I could finally let loose and just start leveling parts of the city until the murderous nutcase ran out of hiding places. Before my fully automatic nuclear-powered plasma cannon buildings were nigh-instantly shattered into flying shrapnel as I blasted craters into the terrain and outright _vaporized_ any of Nilbog's monsters that crossed my line of fire. The immense amounts of dust and heat were of no concern to me since I didn't need to breathe, but even still the destruction was breathtaking. I'd never have been able to pull this off back home, since all the buildings were rated for much more punishment than I could dish out.  
  
I never actually _saw_ Nilbog die with the level of firepower I was throwing around, but after just a few minutes more of this the aerial reconnaissance footage apparently stopped showing any further increases in the monster population. After that it pretty much just amounted to rounding up the stragglers before they could slip the cordon and being debriefed.  
  
Said debriefing occurred with me standing in front of a desk across from a PRT trooper by the name of Emily Piggot. I'd been offered a chair, but after informing everyone of the fact that I massed 750 kilograms, it was immediately determined that I'd simply crush the unfortunate piece of furniture. So, I stood as Piggot remarked "Well, your presence is certainly one of the most unexpected but welcome changes lately. Thanks to you, we're rid of a murderous nutcase and only suffered minimal casualties in the process. That said, I would like to know why exactly you thought it was necessary to level about two thirds of Ellisburg."  
  
I bowed slightly, before answering "Standard doctrine for the Socialist Republic of Amali is to prioritize the protection of innocent lives and the permanent removal of threats above all other factors. Buildings can be rebuilt, books can be reprinted, and businesses can be reestablished. However, people cannot be resurrected barring prior arrangement or exceptional circumstances. As I had no good way of pin-pointing Nilbog's location and his continued survival could not be permitted, my only recourse was obliterating possible hiding spots until I eventually hit the one where he was located. Of course, since the whole point was protecting the innocent, I couldn't do that until I got the all clear that the civilians had been evacuated."


	2. Potterverse 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Dursleys find themselves in legal trouble.

**Potterverse 1**

(POV: Clockwork Knight Beryl)

One moment I was in the fortified trenches around the Hellrift, the next I was encased in solid rock, the gravity sensors indicating that I had wound up on a different planet. Or, well, _in_ a different planet, as the case may be. Straining my motor system to no avail confirmed that I was far enough down that even my prodigious strength was horribly insufficient to get me out. This required a bit of creative problem-solving, especially since I had little idea how deep I was and most emphatically didn't want to accidentally teleport into someone if I tried to escape that way.

So I cued up the interface for my self-repair system, changing my schematics to include Deconjuration Field projectors all across my exterior. After about a minute for my systems to reconfigure I activated the Deconjuration Fields for a split second, instantly erasing more than enough of the rock entombing me for me to start moving around. From there, excavating a staircase to the surface would be a simple -- albeit time-consuming -- endeavor. This is what I did for the next twenty minutes or so, ascending nearly five hundred meters in the process.

This is when I noticed a sudden change in the mineral strata to include uncompacted sediments, along with what were obviously artificial structures such as pipes of various sorts. Quickly repairing the damage I'd done to one of the local sewerage lines after finding myself unceremoniously covered in poop, I cleaned myself up and made myself an exit to the surface. In retrospect, I probably should have just teleported the last few meters, as I accidentally came up through someone's flower bed.

Immediately, I heard sounds of distress and activated Words of Truth at the same time as I turned to see a little boy having a panic attack.

"-I'mgoingtogetblamedforthisIalwaysgetblamedwhensomethingweirdhappenswhy-"

Reaching up to haul myself out of the hole, I said "Deep breaths, you need Oxygen. I'm Clockwork Knight Beryl, and if you explain why you're so upset I'll help you deal with the issue."

Nodding as I heaved myself up, the boy explained "I'm Harry Potter, and I live here with my aunt and uncle. I was watering Aunt Petunia's garden when you came up, and I know I'm going to get blamed for it. They always blame me when something weird happens and call me a freak. That usually means I don't get dinner, and I just know it's going to be even worse now."

Kneeling down, I hummed in sympathy and asked "Harry, do you want me to help put the garden back together? Some of the flowers look intact enough to replant, and it will give us some time to talk things over so we can figure out how to make your life better."

After a few moments, Harry answered "Yes, Beryl."

With that I reached down into the hole I'd dug and cast a gentle telekinesis effect to lift the displaced flowers back to the surface. As I did so, I asked "So, you've mentioned that your aunt regularly denies you meals." The boy gasped slightly as he saw the levitating flowers, but I continued "Is there anything else that you want to tell me about?"

Harry nodded as I adjusted my self-repair system again, this time using it to rapidly construct a steel platform so nothing would fall down the hole I dug. As I did so, Harry told me "I sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, like they want to pretend I don't exist. They've _got_ more bedrooms upstairs, but they just get used for Dudley's toys."

Sighing in sympathy as we both patted the dirt smooth, I noted "Yes, that's definitely got to change. Is there anything else you want to tell me about?"

Harry started poking a hole to stick the first flower in, before he let out what had to be years of pent-up frustrations, saying "They don't just make me skip meals, they make me cook for them too. I'd probably have starved to death by now if I didn't make extra portions of breakfast and hide them, but they've started checking the pantry to see if I used extra ingredients."

A brief pulse of Holy Mana from one of my integrated guns rejuvenated the first replanted flower, and I noted "Harry, I don't think the Durlseys are good for you whatsoever, and I promise that I will get you out of there. That said, is there anything else you want to tell me? Maybe school perhaps?"

A bitter, hollow laugh came from Harry as he said "Uncle Vernon told the school I was some sort of criminal mastermind, so whenever anyone does anything wrong, I'm always the one who gets punished. Also, Dudley gets his gang together to beat me up more than usual if I get higher marks than him, and he's a complete prat."

Thinking for a moment, I asked "Would you like to live with me? It would be rough for the first few days while I got everything set up, but I promise I'll care for you much more than your relatives do."

"Even though I'm a freak who keeps having weird things happen?"

And with that I turned and actually looked at Harry's face with my Mana Thematograph active. Hmmm... Thematic signatures are registering significant interference, but there's definitely magic around this child. Also a malevolent soul fragment in his head, which I needed to excise immediately. Otherwise normal. As such, I answered "You're not a freak, you've just got some magic to you is all. That said, someone evil shoved a fragment of their soul into your head, and I need to remove it now before it hurts you."

Looking up at me, Harry asked "Will it hurt?"

I answered "It might, hopefully not." and with that I fired a massive pulse of Holy Mana directly into Harry's face. The child glowed a bit, but didn't otherwise react all that much aside from looking at his hands with an expression of confusion on his face. Meanwhile, my Thematograph allowed me to keep track of matters as the malevolent soul fragment was completely _incinerated_.

That done, I told Harry "Good news, you are no longer at risk of that soul fragment causing you any harm. Now, I'm going to inform your relatives that I'm taking you into my care. The next stop after that is to talk to whatever authorities can make the whole adoption arrangement official without needing to take over the country and install a new government."

* * *

(POV: Third Person Near Albus Dumbledore)

Nine hours spent in a pointless meeting with officials from the Ministry of Magic had drained much of the patience from Headmaster Dumbledore. Why the Ministry was concerned about the proper allocation of Hogwarts' _decorating budget_ was completely opaque to him, but apparently they'd deemed it important enough to warrant going through every single piece of financial paperwork he'd signed in the last decade for a discrepancy that added up to a mere two knuts. Adding insult to injury, said discrepancy was _in Hogwarts' favor_!

As such, it was entirely unsurprising that when Dumbledore got back to his office he was completely and utterly exhausted. Because of this exhaustion, it took him a whole two minutes to notice that his collection of 'desktop widgets' tracking the status of Harry Potter was behaving very differently than they had prior to the meeting. It took Dumbledore a further several minutes to piece together what all of this _meant._

The row of dipping birds had mostly changed colors from their uniform red, indicating that while Harry Potter was now a significant distance from Privet Drive, he was still within the greater London area. Not too unusual, there.

Meanwhile, the music box had changed from the tunes he recognized as indicating specific people in Harry's life. None of the Dursley's tunes were playing, instead sounding much more like a military marching tune with massive undercurrents of hope and a distinctive electronic edge. Whoever Harry was with, it wasn't someone Dumbledore recognized.

Meanwhile, the 'mood crystal' had shifted to a dark blue with spinning red lights on top... why was Harry Potter at a police station!? Did he get arrested, and if so, what could he have possibly been doing at age six!?

Confusingly, the nine-balled Newton's Cradle that indicated the level of danger Harry was in had stopped swinging completely. Usually it had three balls swinging on each stroke, and he'd never seen it go lower than two. He wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

Taking all this in, Dumbledore came to the logical but completely incorrect conclusion that Harry Potter had _somehow_ gotten himself arrested, and he needed to go Obliviate the officers and give Harry a good scolding.

Sighing, Dumbledore retrieved the specially enchanted Tracking Portkey he'd made for if he ever needed to reach Harry Potter's location in a hurry and teleported off. A moment later, he'd arrived to find a VERY large gun near-instantly lodged under his chin and a metallic being holding him securely as it stated "Identify yourself immediately. I've tuned my defenses to block any further teleportation attempts, so don't even think about getting away before explaining _exactly_ why you came in here like that when I'm busy getting Harry out of an abusive household."

Sensing imminent death if he did not comply, Dumbledore answered "I am Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I knew Harry's parents before they died, and when I found that he had been separated from his foster family I needed to find out what was going on so I could get him back to their protection."

After a moment, the machine asked "Did you know that the Dursleys were regularly starving Harry, sabotaging his education, making him sleep in a cupboard, and forcing him to do all their chores?" as it withdrew the deadly weapon, still holding on with a literally iron grip.

"THEY WERE WHAT!?"


	3. Halkegenia 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've always wondered what would happen if a Familiar fought off the bindings.

**Halkeginia 1**

(POV: Clockwork Knight VanChrome)

I arrived in what was obviously a summoning circle of some sort, though the surroundings immediately ruled out the summoning being a Daemonic one. Looking down at the pink-haired adolescent chanting at me, I activated Words of Truth just in time to hear "-my Familiar!" before she leaned in and kissed me.

[WARNING: COGNITIVE INTRUSION DETECTED, INITIATING ANTI-SUBVERSION MEASURES, LOCKING MOTOR SYSTEM]

[SUBVERSION ATTEMPT PROGRESSING AT 0.1% PER SECOND, MEMORY COUNTER-OVERWRITE ACTIVE]

[SELF-REPAIR SYSTEM COMPROMISED, SCHEMATICS ALTERED TO INCLUDE RUNES ON LEFT HAND. PURGING ALTERED SCHEMATICS.]

[PRIMARY LOCUS OF SUBVERSION ATTEMPT IS RUNES ON LEFT HAND; EJECTING COMPROMISED PART.]

[INTRUSION THEMATICS IDENTIFIED: VOID. QUEUING COUNTER-THEMATICS FROM TCU.]

[SUBVERSION ATTEMPT IS ADAPTING TO LACK OF LEFT HAND, RUNES FORMING ON ENTIRE LEFT ARM. EJECTING.]

[PROJECTIONS OF SUBVERSION ADAPTATION MADE. SELF DESTRUCT PRIMED: YIELD, 30 KILOTONS. TRIGGER, 2% SUBVERSION.]

[COUNTER-THEMATICS READY. ACTIVATING MANA FLOOD.]

[SUBVERSION PROGRESS HALTED AT 1.1%, OVERALL PURGE PROGRESS NEGLIGIBLE.]

[ATTEMPT TO SUBVERT ANTI-SUBVERSION PROTOCOLS DETECTED. REDUNDANT COPIES ACTIVATED. COMMISSAR PROTOCOL ENGAGED.]

[PRIMARY EGO SHUTDOWN UNTIL PURGE COMPLETED, ALL POWER TO ANTI-SUBVERSION MEASURES.]

[SELF-REPAIR SYSTEM AUTHORIZED TO PHYSICALLY DESTROY COMPROMISED MEMORY SECTORS.]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 1%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.9%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.8%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.7%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.6&]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.5%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.4%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.3%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.2%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.1%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.5%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO 0.25%]

[SUBVERSION LEVELS REDUCED TO ZERO]

[ELAPSED TIME: 110 SECONDS. DAMAGES ACCRUED: 30% OF MEMORY SECTORS DESTROYED, LEFT ARM ABSENT, SELF-REPAIR SCHEMATICS MUST BE RE-CREATED FROM INFERENCE.]

[REPAIR SCHEMATICS RE-CREATED. SELF-REPAIR ENGAGED. REACTIVATING MAIN EGO.]

I snapped back to consciousness and glared down at the confused and somewhat terrified pinkette, before snarling out through Words of Truth "I do not approve of attempts to take over my mind. The ONLY reasons I haven't killed you for that are because judging by your confused expression you had no idea the spell worked that way and because I purged the corruption from my systems before it attained a critical threshold. I am leaving and have no plans to return. If anyone here follows me, I will kill said pursuer without hesitation."

That said, I gave the adolescent Mage a solid punch to the temple precisely calibrated to give her a moderate concussion without killing her, and teleported on top of the wall around the courtyard. A few moments later I jumped back down to ground level, and walked off towards the planet's nearest rotational pole.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Louise de La Valliere)

Louise was nervous, anyone would be in her position. Today was her absolute last chance to prove she wasn't a complete failure as a Mage, as if she didn't summon a Familiar she'd be expelled.

So, after carefully drawing a summoning circle, she began her chant.

"I, Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière, in the name of the great Five Pentagon Powers, following my fate, summon a familiar."

There was a thunderous crash and reality seemed to _fracture_ for a moment, cracks seeming to propagate through thin air. For the merest fraction of a second Louise could have sworn she saw a young man wearing a plain white shirt in the middle of the fracture, before he was abruptly replaced with a heavily armed three-eyed metal golem.

Rushing forwards, Louise hurriedly chanted "Pentagon of the Five Elemental Powers, bless this creature and make it my familiar." before immediately kissing the golem.

Abruptly, the construct froze in place, where before it had been looking around as if somewhat confused. Slowly, Louise could see the familiar runes forming on the golem's left hand.

Overjoyed, Louise couldn't help but call out "Finally I did a spell right, I'm not a failure!" as she did what could almost be described as a dance. Briefly, as she was interrupted by the sound of an explosion, and whirled around to see that the hand that had been developing the Familiar runes was no longer attached to the golem in question, and had in fact reduced itself to a small pile of metallic fragments on the ground.

Louise's anxiety only grew as the golem continued to stand immobile, giving out no sign of any further action until the runes started inscribing themselves agonizingly slowly again, this time on the left forearm. A few moments later, the entire arm was fired off at speeds that made it clear that the ejection was no accident. Was her Familiar actually _fighting_ the contract!?

No further runes appeared, but after another minute of awkward silence the golem stirred, a new arm growing from their empty shoulder socket at frightening speed.

Then, as Louise looked up at the golem in confused terror, it spoke "I do not approve of attempts to take over my mind. The ONLY reasons I haven't killed you for that are because judging by your confused expression you had no idea the spell worked that way, and because I purged the corruption from my systems before it attained a critical threshold. I am leaving and have no plans to return. If anyone here follows me, I will kill said pursuer without hesitation."

Louise's last thoughts before being punched into unconsciousness were entirely about being a complete and total failure of a Mage who would almost certainly be expelled in the coming days.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Professor Jean Colbert)

The instructor asked Marie -- Tristain Academy's on-campus medical professional -- "Is Louise going to recover from that golem's punch any time soon?" while staring at the comatose pink-haired form of his student.

Answering seriously, Marie said "Probably. She has a somewhat serious concussion, but I've seen people recover from worse. That said, even after she wakes up, she will need several weeks of bedrest to recover fully, and will only be semi-conscious during most of that time. That metal golem was either very lucky or very careful, as they seem to have precisely struck with the exact amount of force required to incapacitate Louise for a prolonged period without seriously risking her life."

Sighing, Colbert simply noted "Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see then. Please notify me if there are any changes to Louise's condition."

Marie nodded and said "Of course." before gently gesturing towards the door to shoo Colbert out of her office.

Taking the hint, Colbert vacated the room while trying to think what could possibly have happened. He'd taken a look at that arm the golem had left behind, finding both its design and its composition extremely remarkable. However, what bothered him more about that arm was the insignia painted on it. It was obviously some sort of national symbol, but it certainly wasn't a match for any country he'd ever heard of.

Other concerns were the obvious fact that the golem had been actively _fighting_ the Familiar binding, and if its words were to be believed, had actually succeeded at doing so. That was something Colbert had never even heard of happening as even a theoretical possibility, and indicated that whatever sort of golem that was, its creators had put in a rather extreme amount of effort to keep it from being subverted. Then there was the golem's ultimatum, short and simple: anyone who tried to chase after it would die. And yet, they had spared Louise after what they obviously viewed as an incredibly violating attack.

It was with these many contradictions swirling around in his head that Colbert reached his next stop at Osmond's office. As he entered, the headmaster looked up from some paperwork and asked "So, will Louise live?"

As he sat down in the airy office, Colbert answered "As far as Marie can tell the answer is yes, but we don't know for sure yet."

Nodding somberly, Old Osmond thought for a moment, before noting "We won't be able to hide this from the Church, will we? A Familiar rejecting their summoner in such a manner is completely unheard of, and I don't know what sort of punishment they'll try to give us for letting this happen."

Thinking for a moment, Colbert noted "Well, there's one possibility, once Louise wakes up. If that golem did indeed manage to fight off the Familiar contract, then technically speaking Louise shouldn't have a Familiar right now. If that is the case, then she should be eligible to summon another Familiar; we know that she can bring something through just fine, it's just the binding that went wrong. We just arrange a private summoning ritual for her, and claim that whatever new familiar she summons was here all along."

And so, the two professors plotted.


	4. Star Wars 1

**Star Wars 1**

(POV: Clockwork Knight Yarrow)

I emerged in hard vacuum, staring out at countless stars. Rotating my sensor turret quickly revealed that I was in the gravitational influence of a sizable terrestrial planet with three moons, albeit one without much surface water. I could just about make out signs of orbital traffic, which at least indicated that _some_ people lived here. Hmmm... Angular magnitude growth of the planet in my view indicates that I'm approaching at a distressingly fast velocity. I really need a way to control my descent.

So, I reconfigured my self-repair system to enclose my main chassis in a pod made out of regular nanotube steel. Said pod featured six thrust control nodes allowing for full six-axis control, and with the addition of some sensor pods and an auxiliary cognitive driver I had a much better idea where I was going. So, I settled in for a nice sedate cruise towards the planet at around ten kilometers per second, with a nice fifty-gee deceleration burn just as I was approaching the atmosphere. I also adjusted my descent profile so that I'd touch down just a few kilometers outside of one of the larger settlements I'd spotted.

Apparently no-one noticed or cared about my descent, and I touched down unmolested. I quickly deconjured my descent pod, and that done I started walking towards where I remembered the city was. Sure enough, I quickly found myself entering a populated area that seemed to be a residential district, countless small dwellings stacked on top of each other in massive rows. I noticed some people of varying species milling about, but as I approached they largely scattered and tried desperately to ignore my presence. That was fair I suppose, I _was_ a rather intimidating figure.

I figured I'd rather not scare anyone any more than absolutely necessary, so I briefly fired up Words of Truth, said "So, I'm Clockwork Knight Yarrow, and I have no idea where I am. If anyone wants to come talk to me eventually about that, it would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I'm just going to be waiting out here." and simply stood to attention.

Sure enough, eventually I was cautiously approached by one of the local children. They looked human, generally speaking, with straight blonde hair and an inquisitive expression. After a few moments spent in silence, I remarked "I know you're nervous about talking to me, but I can't very well answer any questions that I haven't been asked."

The child said "Just trying to figure out who made you, and how you're put together. I've seen quite a few Droids, but never one like you."

I hummed a bit, before answering "I was actually made by the Titan of Steel, a being who took it upon themselves to rescue their entire planet from the brutal oppression of the Daemons and their Grand Dragon creations. That said, you wouldn't have heard about any of them; I'm almost certainly not in my home universe, given the dimensional crash I was caught in."

Looking up at me, the kid asked "You must have gone on all sorts of adventures, haven't you? I've never gotten the chance, Watto wouldn't allow it despite being a kinder master than before."

Immediately, I asked "Wait, master!? You're a slave? You mean that barbaric practice is extant here!?"

Sadly, the child simply nodded, before saying "Yes. These are the slave quarters of Mos Espa. Everyone here is a slave, and we can't run away or the implanted bombs will go off."

I was horrified, and immediately stood up as I told the child "I'm getting that bomb out of you, along with every last slave on this planet. All I need is a safe location to construct an operating room, then I can do the rest." The plan was already coalescing in my mind. I'd need to reconfigure into a pseudodungeon to get enough hospital space and teleporters to treat everyone. Once I had that up and running, mass-producing more Clockworks to bring down this entire planet's slaving institutions would be trivial. From there I could easily expand to house a shipyard and a research facility, and get started on purging the galaxy of slaving scum once and for all.

Back in physical reality, the boy hesitated for a moment, before he said "Follow me, my mom might know a place." and started walking off towards one of the residences. I followed.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Shmi Skywalker)

When Shmi saw the massive heavily-armed Droid entering her home following Anakin, she had something of a panic attack. After all, that was a hulking humanoid war machine entering her home. This panic attack was slightly eased when said Droid gently closed the door and said "Ma'am. I am Clockwork Knight Yarrow. I'm here to remove the explosive devices implanted in you, your son, and eventually every slave on this planet. Do you have anywhere I can place a secret entrance to an underground operating room? I will require no additional tools or materials. Just tell me where I can work."

Immediately, Shmi was incredulous, asking "Wait, what do you mean that you won't require any additional materials? Are you planning to just magically convert whatever rock and stone you encounter into medical supplies?" there was optimism, and then there was _madness._

Shmi most emphatically was _not_ expecting Yarrow to answer "Not exactly, but you aren't far off." before proving her point by materializing a flawless glass jug full of precious life-giving water from nothing whatsoever. Having gently set down the jug of water on an unoccupied piece of floor, Yarrow noted "I can remove matter as easily as I can create it, so as long as I have a place to work I can trivially make a quite large facility to start getting those bombs out of your people. Where would be a good place to put a concealed entrance?"

Thinking for a moment, Shmi answered "The back room. Follow me." Soon, she had arrived over a specific section of floor and said "Here. This corner will work, as long as the entrance is straight down. The tenement was built into a hillside, so there isn't a dwelling below us here, despite the fact that we live on the second level."

Yarrow replied with "Understood. Please be aware that I am about to drastically reconfigure my chassis, and that this process may be visually disturbing."

With that, Yarrow's limbs and head started to melt away, leaving only the torso lump full of systems as it descended into the floor. After a moment, Shmi looked down the shaft, seeing what looked like a simple square pit lined with metal, seeming a lot deeper than she expected. Shortly afterwards, she saw a lift platform rapidly ascending and ducked out of the way. A mere moment later, the platform was seamlessly flush with the floor of Shmi's home, offering no sign at all that anything was out of the ordinary. Seeing all this, Shmi couldn't help but say "Anakin, your new friend works fast."

Almost as lost as his mother, Anakin replied with a simple, silent nod.

After most of an hour, a holographic projector activated showing a simplistic representation of a three-eyed face. This was an immediate prelude to Yarrow stating "I've reconfigured into a facility, and now I have a suitable operating room to locate and remove your detonators. Stand on the pad, and I'll bring you down. Please be aware that this is a teleportation system, rather than a lift."

* * *

(POV: Yarrow, Pseudodungeon)

It took a few minutes to convince the two people I met to actually trust the teleportation pad I installed. However, once that was done I immediately directed the two to the operating room, where I had a medical scanner set up along with a mechanical surgeon and some other relevant equipment.

Either way, as the mother and son were looking around, I noted "So, first I need to give you a disclaimer. I don't know enough about your biochemistry to safely render you unconscious during the procedure, and I'm not willing to make stupid assumptions that risk your lives. That said, I will be able to suppress the pain signals that you would otherwise experience, and I will take every possible measure to avoid infection. If you think you might need to be strapped in place, please tell me so that I can arrange the restraints prior to the operation and avoid accidentally hurting you any more than absolutely necessary."

The woman thought for a moment, before saying "I could probably stay still, but it would probably be best for you to restrain me anyway. I don't know if I might move involuntarily. The same goes for Anakin."

I made my visual representation nod, before I noted "Understood. One of you onto the scanner table. I need to know where your bombs are before I can safely remove them."

Before the woman could stop him, the boy (apparently named Anakin) jumped up onto the scanner, and when I told him "Please lie down so I can get a better quality scan." he obediently did so.

Thus I fired up the scanner, rapidly locating a foreign object about one centimeter long implanted in Anakin's right armpit. It wasn't quite touching his lung, but it _was_ uncomfortably close to the vital organ in question. As soon as I found it, I informed my patient "I have located the bomb in your ribcage immediately adjacent to your armpit. Please remove your shirt before I strap you down. While I could trivially provide a replacement garment, I would prefer to avoid unnecessarily damaging your possessions."

A few moments later Anakin's shirt was removed, I had him immobilized, a Holy-powered pain suppression effect was active, and I had just disinfected Anakin's skin in preparation for the initial incision. Carefully, I made a single small cut, then inserted a small gripping appendage to pull the bomb out. Seconds later the explosive device was in the disposal bin, and I activated the regeneration mode on the general purpose spell matrix I'd built into the operating theater. Anakin's wound closed up, and I cheerfully informed him "Good news, you're no longer at risk of sudden explosive death. You're a free sapient, and as soon as I've finished overthrowing the planetary government it will even be official."

As I talked, I quickly cleaned off the operating table, a process which included the total destruction of the few drops of Anakin's blood that had been spilled.

Another few moments later, Anakin's mother was on the operating table, and the scanner quickly found the bomb... in her neck, between the airway and esophagus. Why would someone even put it there!? Yes it's harder to remove safely, but by the same token getting it in there _had_ to have been a pain. As such, I informed the woman "Your bomb is at an inconvenient location in your neck. To remove it I will need to insert manipulator appendages into your esophagus through your mouth. Please hold as still as you possibly can, as the immobilization I can provide will be limited."

After that warning, the operation went about as smoothly as it could possibly have been hoped, given the circumstances. I had the bomb out of Anakin's mother in less than a minute, and as soon as the operation was complete I noted "The operation was successful at removing the explosive device. You might suffer some mild discomfort while swallowing during the next few days, as your system isn't fully acclimatized to Mana-enhanced healing yet, so there is unfortunately a small patch of scar tissue in your esophagus."

Nodding in acknowledgement, the woman noted "Thank you sincerely, Yarrow. I know there isn't much, but is there anything at all we can provide to pay you back?"

Without hesitating at all, I answered "A list of the biggest slavers on the planet, along with a basic rundown of what factions are supporting slavery both here and in the wider galaxy. I need accurate information to get rid of the slavers before they wise up to my activities and start using the bombs in other slaves as a hostage situation."

She took a deep breath, and began speaking "Well, the biggest group supporting slavery is the Hutts..." she continued on giving me as much knowledge of the situation as she had for the next hour. Meanwhile Anakin occasionally chimed in, and I was carefully noting down every single thing they said.

_Thus, on a backwater planet in a largely irrelevant part of the galaxy, a Clockwork decided that the continued existence of the Hutts as a galactic power bloc was intolerable..._


	5. DOOM 1

**DOOM 1**

(POV: Clockwork Knight Adamant)  
  
Immediately after the command to pulse all dimensional jammers, I found myself in a barren rocky wasteland streaked with lava flows. Immediately, my Mana Thematograph pinged "Demon, Evil, Clockwork, Torment" as the local Themes. Apparently, I was in a hell dimension, though not the one I had been previously engaged in combat with. On the other hand, it was a solid bet that whatever sort of Daemonic hierarchy existed here was busily committing atrocities and needed to be removed immediately.  
  
Of course, I didn't have much time to think on that, since the dozens of cybernetic Daemons in my immediate proximity noticed my presence near-instantly and started attacking. I obligingly returned the violence, opening up at full power Nuclear Smite with my Omni-rifle at the same time as I began teleporting around and dodging like mad. My omnidirectional sonar was nearly overwhelmed by the amount of contacts in my immediate vicinity as I also started firing the occasional nuclear missile on low yield and continuously running the Plasma Pulse weapon in my chest at maximum area denial throughput, salting the area with literal _tons_ of Holy-charged radioactive isotopes. Yet despite the frankly ridiculous amount of carnage I was causing and the literal near-mountain of heavily irradiated Daemonic corpses I was quickly climbing, I just couldn't seem to make an actual dent in the endless influx of Daemons, and my armor was slowly being worn down despite my self-repair system running at full tilt.  
  
Clearly, this wasn't sustainable. I needed backup so that I could rotate out of the line of fire, and for that I would need to self replicate. To self-replicate, I would need to get away from this massive Daemonic legion long enough that doing so wouldn't be complete suicide. My decision made, I immediately fired ten missiles straight up in loiter mode and legged it at top speed, using a teleport to get out of the mob currently surrounding me. As I ran, I directed the loitering missiles to hit the closest parts of the mob to me, discouraging pursuit. Occasionally, I needed to replenish the swarm of missiles overhead, but that wasn't any significant issue. For the briefest of moments I'd actually thought I'd gotten away, then I spotted another massive mob of Daemons up ahead. I was caught in a pincer.  
  
Immediately, I directed a massive number of my indirect fire missiles to blast the back lines of the Daemonic horde at their maximum yield of 120 kilotons each. This would give me a brief reprieve, but since I didn't much want to nuke myself into molten slag, it didn't help all that much with the hundreds of Daemons I'd need to fight off to get that reprieve. That's when a figure in green armor made their presence known, brutally tearing into the demonic flanking element with a wide variety of weapons. Interesting, the Daemons actually seemed _nervous_ of that person's presence, as they were visibly hesitant to engage them in combat.  
  
Either way, I had bigger problems in the form of the force that had originally been pursuing me, since they weren't currently occupied by that trooper. As such, I whirled around and once more started blasting with Nuclear Smite mode, the Holy-charged blasts of C-fractional plasma having a distinct tendency to blast all but the largest Daemons into smears on the terrain with only one or two hits. Considering that I was firing upwards of 40 such shots per second and was hitting almost every time, I was _rapidly_ mowing down Daemon after Daemon, especially when I mixed in the occasional low-yield missile shot.  
  
After a few minutes of constant firing, I noticed that my current area of focus was currently clear of Daemons and that the figure in green was near me. I immediately started the self-replication macro, a bud that would soon be an entirely new Clockwork Knight forming on my back. As I did so I shouted to the man in green "Keep those Daemons off me for a few minutes so I can self-replicate!"  
  
The man's only reply at the moment was an incredibly brief thumbs-up, before he got right back to killing. Good enough.  
  
The first system of my child to come online were the reactors, followed immediately afterwards by the self-repair nodes and their brain. As soon as that was complete, I detached the 'egg' from my back and got started on making a new one.  
  
Meanwhile, the 'eggs' I was laying very rapidly achieved their final atomic configuration, standing up and getting ready to fight in just a couple minutes; that said, it would take them nearly half an hour to finalize their durability enchantments, which meant that compared to me the three newborns I'd just created were still highly squishy and didn't yet have their full firepower.  
  
Taking a brief moment, I turned to look for the man in green and noticed that there weren't currently any Daemons around. As such I told him "My children and I can handle ourselves from here on out. I look forwards to fighting alongside you in the future."  
  
The man in green simply nodded before going on his way to whatever else he had been planning on doing. As he left, I turned to my triplets and said "Guess what kids? We're going to build a fortified factory complex."  
  
As one, they replied "Sure thing, dad!"  
  
With that, we got to work. Carrie took overwatch duties first, bombarding large groups of Daemons with nuclear ordnance before they could get closer than a hundred kilometers. Fireheart and Jerry meanwhile started digging the initial fortified positions.  
  
As for me? I was the only one here whose reactors were fully enchanted right now, meaning I was on system construction duty. More particularly, the first thing on the to-do list was the base's reactor system, as that would drastically accelerate production and make skipping the Minimal Enchantments phase practical. Plus, when I added the mind who'd become the facility, they'd have plenty of power output to work with. Being a place was a bit too much of a transition for me to make comfortably; I had every intention of remaining a Knight.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near VEGA)  
  
The Artificial Intelligence currently inhabiting the Doom Slayer's armor was intrigued. Those robots were clearly highly capable at killing Demons, but by the same token there was nothing remotely similar in any records they had access to; their technology base showed no commonality with the humanity VEGA knew, the Sentinels, or the Maykrs; this was especially the case due to a complete lack of Argent energy usage. Similarly, their demonstrated self-replication capabilities meant that if not constantly pressured they could plausibly increase their power far beyond what Hell could cope with. Yet, when that first robot was found, they were the only one present.  
  
Idly, VEGA started comparing hypotheses against the known data about these newcomers. After a few obviously wrong ideas were immediately discarded, they narrowed things down at least somewhat. All available evidence indicated that those robots (now codenamed the Autonomous Knights) had arrived in Hell very recently in extremely small number. On the other hand, clearly these were extremely effective combatants when it came to killing Demons and knew what they were, even if they used a slightly different word. Making this apparent contradiction even more annoying, if this had been a deliberate intrusion into Hell on the part of whoever made those robots, they would presumably have produced more combatants prior to entering.  
  
At the moment, VEGA's tenuous hypothesis was that whatever faction originated the Autonomous Knights knew of Hell and built the constructs to counteract its influence, but that the Autonomous Knight who they had encountered entered Hell by accident. This fit most evidence, including the demonstrated complete independence from Argent energy; a civilization that serious about having nothing to do with Hell would naturally refuse to be dependent on anything sourced from it.  
  
However, this hypotheses didn't quite fit with the total lack of prior documentation; even Hell tended to keep records of the civilizations they interacted with, and a civilization that familiar with and contemptuous of Hell would surely have been mentioned. Perhaps this hypothetical civilization learned of Hell through second-hand experience and took precautions? Immediately after thinking that, VEGA came to the conclusion that they were at the limits of what they could postulate from available evidence, and turned their attention to more productive endeavors.  
  
Namely, helping guide the Doom Slayer to the location of the Fortress of Doom.  
  
Admittedly VEGA _also_ wanted to investigate the infinitesimally small trickle of power they could now detect coming from their core processor of all places, but that would have to wait.


	6. Earth Bet 2

**Earth Bet 2**

(POV: Clockwork Knight Catherine)

In the aftermath of me demolishing most of Ellisburg, I found myself chatting with Emily Piggot over lunch at the nearest PRT department. Well, it was lunch for her at least; seeing as I didn't need to eat. I suppose it could also technically be considered an interrogation, but I didn't really mind; I rather liked the lady's no-nonsense attitude, and it's not like anything I was telling her about the Republic of Amali would really hurt them. Mana mechanics were possibly in that bin, but at this point I'd spread enough Mana around that it getting everywhere on the planet and subjected to scientific analysis was just a matter of time. It wasn't like I could actually _stop_ it, so I might as well make sure things went smoothly to avoid people getting hurt.

Either way, our conversation started with a specially reinforced chair rated for my immense weight being provided. I was moderately curious where the PRT had gotten it on such short notice, but I wasn't about to question the comfortable seating. Shortly afterwards, Emily asked "So, from reports you mentioned that you apparently run on magic? Would you like to explain that?"

Briefly depressing my sensor turret to imitate a nod, I noted "So, to be more specific most of my systems run on Mana, which isn't exactly matter or energy in the conventional sense. That said it can easily be converted to or from matter, energy, or cognitive activity. The conversion ratios are pretty unbalanced, meaning that by conjuring a sufficiently energy-dense fuel you can actually get a net Mana gain."

After another few moments of thought and a bite of her sandwich, Emily said "So, going by what you've told me, I'm guessing that you're powered that way? It would make sense given that you don't seem to have any sort of port for taking in fuel or recharging your batteries."

Another simulated nod, and I replied "Got it in one; the fuel I'm burning is Protonium, a synthetic nucleus made out of one thousand protons and zero neutrons. Technically it's a form nuclear fission."

This actually prompted a chuckle from Emily, as she said "Best to be on the lookout for Scion then; he's made an occasional hobby of trashing nuclear weapons."

There was another pause, before Emily sighed and finally got right to the point, asking "So, to make a long story short, apparently you mentioned that super-powered individuals can be produced by prolonged exposure to high levels of Mana coupled with specialized training regimes. Would you mind doing that for us?"

Leaning back a bit, I noted "It's actually already happening, and I couldn't stop it even if I wanted to. Though a small amount, you're actually producing your own Mana already just from being around me, as has anyone else I've interacted with. They've doubtless encountered other people and kickstarted their Mana generation and so on. Inside two years environmental Mana levels will be high enough for just about anyone to develop capabilities that would currently be described as superhuman if they put their mind to it."

Looking mildly shocked, Emily responded "But I don't feel any different? Shouldn't I be able to tell if I suddenly had magic powers?"

Thinking for a moment, I noted "Well, you're only generating a trickle of Mana and you've had it for less than a day, so that's not surprising. That said, I can probably teach you how to control your Mana along with the basic four spells right now if you like."

Looking around, Emily asked "In the cafeteria? Are you sure that's a good idea?"

My reply was a simple "Good point, practicing the smokescreen or repulse spell in here is probably a bad idea. On the other hand, the Theme Ping spell will be easy for me to verify if you've managed it, and will be almost totally nondisruptive. So, first thing's first, you need to get really introspective to feel your Mana system the first time; you haven't developed a cohesive set of thematics yet, so it should feel like a vague warmth along your nerves, with a major concentration in your brain. Once you can feel it, you should be able to move it around without much trouble."

Emily blinked, incredulously asking "Are you seriously telling me to meditate for superpowers?"

I mimicked another nod, before bluntly saying "Yes. Now do you want to learn magic or not?"

And with that, Emily closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. I waited patiently with my Mana Thematograph active, watching the woman's nascent Mana system gently diffusing Mana into the environment. I didn't have to wait long until I saw a significant contraction towards her brain, followed by a rebound. Emily's eyes snapped open, and she said "Wow, that's a serious rush. It's like there's an entire part of me that I didn't know was there before now."

In response, I remarked "That's because it didn't exist until your initial Mana exposure. Anyway, here's how the Theme Ping spell works. First, you need to understand the basics of how Thematics work. Basically, almost all Mana has a distinct Theme to it that informs what sorts of things that Mana is useful for. As such, if you can identify what themes of Mana someone has, you can get a general idea of their capabilities. Anyway, to do a Theme Ping you just need to fire out a bit of Mana after imprinting it with the idea that it bounces off stuff and picks up on the Themes it hits."

Shrugging, Emily remarked "Sounds simple enough." pointed straight at me, and fired a pulse of Mana. After a few moments, she asked "Atomic Clockwork and Holy? Mind explaining those to me?"

I was about to start when a man's voice from off to the side asked "What's this I hear about magic? Imitating Myrrdin?"

Both Emily and I turned to look, seeing what I recognized as one of the Protectorate's "capes", namely a flying telekinetic codenamed Grav. He was floating over towards us with his lunch tray in his hands. Well, until he got within six meters of me, at which point he fell to the floor with a confused yell that was interrupted by him briefly burying his face in his mashed potatoes.

Immediately I dashed over and helped the man up, asking "Are you alright?"

Shuddering, Grav answered "Not sure, my powers have never crapped out on me like that before."

Thinking fast, I said "One of my systems may be responsible for this. I'm turning it off, try now." at the same time as I deactivated my Dimensional Jammer. Immediately, Grav floated back up by a few inches before I noted "Turning it back on." which lead to him falling again as soon as I reactivated the Dimensional Jammer.

Everyone in the room was looking at me for several moments of stunned silence before Emily asked "Wait, you're a power nullifier? Why didn't you tell us?"

In response, I answered in an extremely serious tone "Because the system responsible was never intended to nullify powers; it's the jammer technology used to block dimensional travel. The only possible way for it to nullify powers is if those powers are _external_ to Parahumans, and are being provided by an extradimensional agent. I had found the entire idea of Parahumans rather suspicious before now, and those suspicions have been largely confirmed; so many of the oddities surrounding the phenomena make much more sense in light of this information. I'm going public with this before some idiot can classify it; your world is under extradimensional assault and everyone needs to know."

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Rebecca Costa-Brown)

The Cauldron conspirator currently undercover as Chief Director of the PRT _had_ been enjoying a relaxing chunk of time mercifully free of paperwork, when suddenly an aide showed up and dropped a bulging manilla envelope on her desk that had been stamped with a big red [TOP PRIORITY] [DELIVER TO CHIEF DIRECTOR IMMEDIATELY] [INFORMATION PUBLIC]

Information _public_!? The only way that could happen and get a Top Priority stamp is if something so massive and impossible to hide happened that the information control teams simply gave up. So, dreading what she was about to read, Rebecca opened the envelope.

What followed was several incident reports, the first of which recounted how an extremely powerful sapient combat robot accidentally arrived in Ellisburg from another universe and subsequently leveled most of the city to put down a murderous biotinker. Then there was a report of this self-identified "Clockwork Knight Catherine" successfully inducing powers in a PRT strike team leader just by talking to them, along with anecdotal evidence that a substance called "Mana" was now uncontrollably spreading and would allow nearly anyone to develop superhuman capabilities if they put their minds to it. Honestly, those first two reports were more a boon than anything else, since it would allow the PRT to massively increase the number of powered personnel available through dedicated training programs.

Then there was the third report. Apparently, Catherine had a dimensional interdiction system installed in her chassis, which became relevant when a Protectorate member who'd been nearby went to join the conversation and wound up getting their powers nulled. Catherine had immediately put the available evidence together and arrived at the accurate conclusion that powers were being provided by extradimensional agents and that Earth Bet was under extradimensional assault. She then proceeded to teleport out to a concealed location and hijack every television and radio broadcast over a significant portion of North America using a _ten Gigawatt_ radio transmitter informing everyone tuned into those media of her identity, her findings, her intention to make Dimensional Jammers widely available as soon as possible, and that she had chosen to do this for the explicit purposes of keeping "some short-sighted fool" from classifying the information.

This left Rebecca caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if she authorized the mass deployment of the jammers, she would completely cripple Cauldron's operating capabilities. On the other hand, if she were to obstruct the jammers' deployment it would almost immediately expose her as not having the public's best interests in mind. Then there was Clockwork Knight Catherine to consider; that robot had leveled half a city to save lives (as strange as that sentence sounded) and singlehandedly deployed one of the most powerful radio transmitters on Earth Bet to get her message out to the public. Something told Rebecca that someone like that wasn't terribly likely to stand aside from what she would obviously view as incompetence.

So, after thinking for several minutes about her course of action, Rebecca signed the forms to force the jammers through the most rigorous and red-tape laden Tinker-Tech evaluation she could think of, Doored to HQ, and told Doctor Mother that Contessa would be needed to eliminate an interloper.


	7. Potterverse 2

(POV: Clockwork Knight Beryl)

After our somewhat rocky introduction, Dumbledore and I had managed to settle down to a relatively civil conversation, each of us sitting in a chair we'd magicked into existence. We'd already gone over my origins, the basics of the hidden society of magic users lurking about, how Harry came to be living with the Dursleys, and the fact that I would get physical again if he tried to wipe the memories of any of the police officers. We'd been chatting for several minutes, before I noted "I don't think that what you call magic and what I call magic are actually the same thing. They behave far too differently."

Looking thoughtful for a moment, the elderly wizard replied "You may very well be right, though I would like to hear your reasoning."

I answered "The biggest difference seems to be how magic spreads in each case. The magic you wield seems to be a purely inherited trait, with no possibility for someone born without it to ever use it. Mana on the other hand gets absolutely everywhere, spreads exponentially, and simply doesn't care who's using it." Idly pointing at one of the police officers watching us at random I noted "I could probably already teach that lady a few basic spells of the sort I know, but I highly doubt you could say the same."

Nodding, Dumbledore confirmed "No, I don't believe I could. Nor am I quite certain what will happen once this Mana you've described spreads to every person in the world. Wizarding society is deeply traditional and is unlikely to accept such a drastic change as this easily."

Releasing a simulated sigh, I said "They won't have much choice in the matter. I've run the projections, and those outside the wizarding world will have sufficient esoteric defenses up to render your memory wiping coverup teams ineffective within a decade at the longest. People won't take kindly to the knowledge that elitist magic users have been violating their minds for centuries."

A sad look on his face, Dumbledore agreed "Yes, this doesn't seem to be a change that can actually be avoided. I just fear the bloodshed that will occur when hidebound old wizards collide with an onslaught of justifiably upset empowered muggles."

A saddened hum, as I noted "Yes, that doesn't seem to be completely avoidable, and we both know that lots of innocent people will get caught in the crossfire when that happens. Still, there has to be some way to mitigate the casualties aside from the brute force approach of making an army of Clockworks and arresting most of the planet's population."

Thinking for a few moments, Dumbledore said "I actually have a fairly sizable amount of political influence within the British Wizarding World. If I apply it carefully I might be able to gradually loosen the restrictions on secrecy to a degree and get Wizards and Witches used to going out in public once the new magic starts taking off. That might help with the backlash from my side of things somewhat at least."

I replied "Not sure what I can do about the outer world's reaction so long as the memory wipes remain standard operating procedure. When that gets out, people are going to be absolutely furious. I'm expecting lynch mobs."

Making a saddened sigh, Albus said "You are quite likely correct in that regard. That said, stopping Obliviation is going to be an extremely hard challenge, since the laws mandating its use reach beyond my sphere of influence. I simply don't have the capacity to unilaterally stop it."

That prompted me to ask "What if I made a bunch more Clockworks and we visit all the various centers of wizarding governance to explain the problem and 'persuade' them to see reason? Worst case scenario of that is needing to coup most of the wizarding governments, and being completely honest they aren't long for this world anyway once everyone else notices."

Dumbledore went silent for a few minutes as he thought about the idea, before he said "Sadly, that might actually be the best of a lot of bad options. I certainly can't see any other way to stop Obliviation from happening worldwide, and as you have mentioned, the use of Obliviate is one of the major issues that will turn the outside world against us Wizards and Witches."

"Am I to take that as permission to go ahead with the plan?"

To this, Dumbledore shook his head, before saying "I know it probably won't work, but I would like to try my hand at the diplomatic route first. If it doesn't work, I will contact you again by owl."

I hummed in confirmation, before saying "On a somewhat less grisly topic, I still have every intention of adopting Harry and raising him as best I'm able. Do you have any remaining objections to that?"

Sighing, Dumbledore said "Only one, though it seems surmountable. The last Dark Lord still has a lot of old bitter followers around who believe in his ideals, and I'm worried that without the protective enchantment being recharged by proximity to blood relatives he may be at risk."

In response, I simply answered "Understood. By the time Harry is accepted to Hogwarts, I'll have trained and armed him to the point that I would gladly have served alongside him at the Battle of the Hellrift. You have my word on that."

There was another brief pause, before I noted "Just remembered something important. When I first met Harry, he had a soul fragment from someone absolutely evil lodged in the scar on his forehead. I got it out. Do you think that had anything to do with the former Dark Lord?"

Immediately, Dumbledore stiffened, before he admitted "Probably. I now have a much better idea of how Voldemort was such a seemingly invincible presence prior to his sudden disappearance, but I will need to do a bit of research to confirm my suspicions."

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Harry Potter)

It had been a few days since he had been adopted by Beryl, and as far as Harry was concerned, events had taken a turn for the bizarre. Beryl's first priority was getting a place to live, which proved mildly problematic for the simple reason that Beryl had absolutely no money to purchase or rent a residence. After asking around for a few hours and determining the local homeless shelters woefully inadequate for raising a child, Beryl had informed Harry "Good news, you're going to be an astronaut. We're going to be building a moon fortress to live in, since no-one will actually be able to enforce a squatting complaint that way."

Looking up at his new mechanical caretaker, Harry couldn't help but ask "Er, doesn't going to the moon need a rocket?", vaguely remembering how history class mentioned that the Americans went to the moon.

That's when Beryl responded "Indeed, that is the case." and began growing a space launch vehicle the size of an SUV designed to seat both Harry and Beryl. One brachistochrone trajectory and a custom-made space suit later, Harry Potter was standing on the moon, looking at Earth on the horizon.

It took several moments for him to process this sudden change of locale, but eventually Harry remarked through the suit's comms "It's going to be really lonely on the moon. I hope we can have visitors over regularly."

Looking up from the construction site for the initial center of the moon fortress, Beryl answered "I promise you, I'll make sure you get plenty of chances to interact with other children. Come to think of it, would you mind if I were to adopt more siblings for you?"

Immediately, Harry spun around and almost fell over in the low gravity before he exclaimed "Really? You'd do that for me? And you wouldn't let them bully me, or anything?"

Taking a break from the construction, Beryl knelt down and gave Harry a gentle hug as he replied "Of course."


	8. Halkeginia 2

**(** POV: Clockwork Knight VanChrome)

There were several reasons for my decision to leave the area I had arrived in. First and foremost, the experience had me in a nearly murderous fury towards that particular group of magic users, but judging by the reactions I had observed, none of them actually deserved to die. I needed some time to come down off the emotional high and actually think clearly about my situation. There was also a debatably irrational fear of a repeat occurrence, which I might not come back from. Last time I had come dangerously close to the self-destruct threshold, which would have killed who knows how many people in a nuclear fireball.

So I walked due north, climbing straight over whatever obstructions presented themselves. Eventually I would hit either a town or a coastline, then I could decide what to do. I trudged along for several hours, before eventually coming across a small town. About thirty assorted buildings, some fields for growing food, rows of trees that still had blossoms all over them, a couple barns, just generally giving off the impression of a small-time farming community. I'd have to be careful to avoid scaring everyone off, but otherwise it could be nice to spend some time here while I got my bearings.

As such, I slowed down to a pace that a baseline human would consider fairly sedate as I walked the last eight hundred meters into town. I idly noted that it currently seemed to be spring planting, judging by the plows being towed by some beast of burden that I didn't recognize. Several people looked up from what they were doing with easily recognizable expressions of concern and even some fear. As soon as I noticed this, I stood still, fired up Words of Truth, and said "I mean you no harm. I would like to talk with you after today's chores are done; what you're doing is important, and it would be rude for me to get in the way."

That done, I returned to my sedate walking pace until I reached the town, conjured up a chair for myself, and sat down to wait. Sure enough, a couple hours later a few of the people living here walked up. I'd already put my modular weaponry in a small pile off to the side since I wouldn't be needing it right now, which seemed to reassure them at least somewhat. After a few moments of awkward silence, I noted "You've all clearly got a lot of questions that you're worried about asking. Go ahead and ask, I won't take offense."

The first to ask was a well-muscled woman wearing no-nonsense work clothing, asking "What are you and why are you here?"

Simulating a nod, I answered "I am a Clockwork Knight, a magical construct created in another world. I was caught in an unexpected anomaly at the Battle of the Hellrift and wound up in a summoning circle. I then proceeded to purge the mental domination effect that Mage was trying to inflict on me, punched her unconscious, and walked straight north until I arrived here."

Immediately, everyone reacted with fear, before the woman said "You need to leave, now. If the nobility find out we're harboring you after you assaulted one of their children they'll wipe our town off the map and we won't be able to stop them because we can't use magic!"

Zeroing in on her, I asked "So, to be clear, this country operates on the basis of Mage supremacy, and this magical nobility is perfectly willing to engage in collective punishment against those they consider lesser?"

Nodding frantically as she futilely tried to push me out of town, the woman answered "Yes, that's why you need to get out of here!"

Thinking for a moment, I said "Well, going by what you just said, I think what you really need is a change of government. No regime that relies on terrorizing their citizens like this is worth keeping, and luckily for you I happen to be a highly principled machine with plenty of power to make things happen."

With that I stood up, teleported to a clear vantage point before jogging to outside the town's fields, and got down to the business of self-replicating.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Louise)

Groggily, Louise woke up with a splitting headache. After a few moments, she managed to get together enough willpower to open her eyes, and found herself face-to-face with a machine much like the one she had summoned. This one was painted up in a garish blue-red plaid pattern though. Through the pounding headache, Louise was barely able to get up the motivation to turn and look before the machine said "Ah, good. You're awake. I'll be able to finalize treatment for that concussion of yours soon."

With that, the machine got out a device that looked an awful lot like someone wedged a crystal ball into a metallic box and brought it up to Louise's head. A few moments later, Louise noticed the agonizing pain in her head receded, and the pink-haired Zero found herself able to think clearly.

With that clarity of thought, she was able to ask "I thought you said you wouldn't be coming back?"

Much to Louise's surprise, the machine answered "That is what VanChrome said. However, I am not him. I am Clockwork Knight Cuprate, and I am currently responsible for your recovery."

Another few moments of thought, before Louise managed to say "I could have sworn I only summoned a single Clockwork. Why are you here?"

Sitting down in a nearby heavily reinforced chair, Cuprate responded "We Clockworks are capable of making more of ourselves very, very quickly. I was constructed two days ago."

This immediately puzzled Louise, and she found herself wondering just how long she was unconscious. Eventually, she asked "After I summoned VanChrome, how long was I unconscious, and why are you here at the academy?"

Cuprate's answer shook Louise to the bone, "You have been unconscious for nine days. During that time, the previous government of Tristain has been deposed and the previous social structure of nobility has been abolished. The academy is still in operation, though much of the non-teaching staff has left for other opportunities."

Immediately, nightmarish visions of mass executions whirled through Louise's head. However, before she could ask, Cuprate cut her off with "None of your family or acquaintances are deceased, nor are they being held as any sort of hostage. They simply no longer have authority to rule over the masses. That said, many did need to be non-lethally incapacitated."

This immediately clashed with Louise's sensibilities and she mumbled an incoherent sentence that might have had something to do with Tristain's tradition of Mage rule.

At this, Cuprate at least had the decency to look somewhat apologetic (somehow) before answering "The magic native to our home universe spreads uncontrollably through the environment and the people occupying it. It is already in low-level usage by a significant portion of the formerly non-magical population, and would have eventually lead to a bloody revolution if the pent up class tensions were not dealt with in some manner. We took action to prevent countless innocent people from being killed, and to end the abuses suffered daily by commoners."


	9. Star Wars 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Qui-gonn Jinn and Obi-Wan do not in fact meet Anakin, and Anakin does not in fact become a Jedi.

(POV: Yarrow, Pseudodungeon)

Preparations for purging Tatooine of Slavers took a little while to get ready. First and foremost was actually finding everyone who was responsible for facilitating the slave trade. Shmi's information was excellent for this, but it was clear that her knowledge was distinctly limited. As such, my first course of action was infiltrating the slave markets using rather literal surveillance bugs; bio-engineering wasn't my strong suit, but I'd already got a research and development team of millions of Clockworks happily doing science in the massive underground complex I'd quickly become. Some local insect fauna was quickly captured and analyzed, before the research team came back with a close copy, except that this one had drastically improved sensory organs, and an integrated Mana Comms system allowing for remote direction and sensory data streaming.

I made about ten million of the little bugs in question and surreptitiously scattered them around the various settlements of Tatooine, my insectile observers quickly displacing the unaltered bugs from their ecological niche and settling in to watch the various comings and goings. Very rapidly I started assembling a comprehensive list of everyone who was buying, selling, or trading slaves on the planet. Within forty eight hours I had a hit list of people who I needed to take out, complete with a few exceptions who turned out to be fronts for a secretive 'Underground Hyperlane' that made a point of liberating slaves. I made sure to note down the exceptions, and started getting the forces of every Clockwork Knight who volunteered for the job into position.

I was going to do this quickly and simultaneously. The first that any slaver would know of this would be the receiving end of a quick, clean kill; anything slower and there was a risk that they'd set off the detonators in the remaining slaves. As such, I was getting strategic-range teleporter pads ready for worldwide deployment during the period of observation. Sadly, during this period, I _did_ notice a few slaves being unfortunately detonated. In a couple cases I was able to recover and resuscitate them, but most of the time I would have had to break stealth to achieve that.

One thing I _did_ do while I was waiting however was use a low-yield protonium warhead to kill that nightmarish living execution pit Jabba apparently liked to throw people into. If this planet never saw another Sarlacc, it would be too soon.

Either way, at the end of forty eight hours (about a day and a half local time), I was ready. I sent the command through the tactical net, and every single Knight walked to their teleporter pad. Mere moments later, I flung them all through pseudo-space to their targets. Watching through the eyes of my bugs, I saw to it that justice was done.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Jabba the Hutt)

The sail barge known as the Khetanna gently cruised through Tatooine's atmosphere at a leisurely pace. Aboard, Jabba was smugly gloating to his various subordinates about how today he would get rid of a major thorn in his side. After all, he'd finally caught the pair of vigilante Twi'Lek who had been having a surprising amount of success at stealing his _personal_ slaves. As such, when one of the crew aboard the sail barge informed Jabba <<We have arrived at the Great Pit of Carkoon. Or, well, where it's supposed to be.>> the Hutt simply hummed in acknowledgement, before abruptly starting in surprise.

Immediately snapping to attentively gaze at the unfortunate underling, Jabba asked <<What do you mean, where it's _supposed_ to be?>>

To this, the Rodian answered <<There's only a smoldering crater where the Great Pit was. Said crater is faintly radioactive, suggesting that someone took offense to the Sarlacc's existence and fed it some nuclear ordnance.>>

After a moment, Jabba heaved himself off his seat and began slithering towards the ramp for accessing the top deck, idly asking <<Curiously, how _deep_ is the crater?>>

As he came out onto the shaded top deck, Jabba idly heard his underling comment <<At least a hundred meters, sir.>>

Indeed, Jabba thought, the crater was that deep. In fact, seeing it in-person conveyed a new appreciation for just how _big_ the Sarlacc had actually been. Then he looked up, and saw some of his other underlings looking around in sheer confusion on the skiff, apparently uncertain if they should simply kick the pair of rebellious lesbian Twi'Lek over the side to their deaths by falling.

Groaning in frustration, Jabba called out <<Drop them off the side already! The Sarlacc is gone, so we might as well->>

That's when the Hutt crime lord was treated to a very brief yet incredibly peculiar sight. Namely, a three-eyed combat droid seemingly appearing from nowhere right in front of him. He barely had time to process said droid bringing their arm up in a single smooth motion before he found himself staring down the barrel of the integrated gun on said arm. After the briefest fraction of a second, the combat droid fired, the hypervelocity bullet splattering nearly the entirety of Jabba's head in a massive fountain of gore.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Qui-Gon Jinn)

The elderly Jedi master nearly fell out of his seat as the ship abruptly dropped out of Hyperspace. After steadying himself and helping Jar-Jar Binks back to his feet, Qui-Gon asked towards the cockpit "What happened? Normally dropping out of hyperspace isn't that disruptive."

In response, the three-eyed combat droid aboard responded "You slammed right into the dimensional jamming field around Tatooine that we put up to stop some nutcase from disabling their hyperdrive's safeties and slamming into the planet."

Abruptly, everyone whirled to face the heavily-armed intruder in their midst. Qui-Gon Jin and Obi-Wan both readied to draw their lightsabers while Padme readied her blaster. After a tense moment, the droid noted "Apologies, I should have introduced myself when I boarded. I am Clockwork Knight Vigilance, and I am currently operating in a customs capacity for Tatooine. That said, what is your purpose for coming here? Please be aware that I will know if you lie."

After a few moments, Padme answered "We were trying to reach Coruscant so we could get relief for the blockade of Naboo. Our ship was damaged when we ran the blockade, and this was the only planet we could reach before our hyperdrive failed where the Trade Federation would not find us."

Nodding solemnly, the droid going by Vigilance answered "Understood. Dock at any of our spaceport facilities and we'll see what we can do to repair your starship. Please bear in mind that it may take some time to fabricate compatible replacement parts, but we will eventually manage it. In addition, we will begin preparing a relief force for Naboo immediately."

Somewhat flabbergasted and suspicious at the sheer generosity on display, Qui-Gon Jinn noted "That's awfully kind of you, though I'm not sure how we can pay for it."

This is about when Vigilance slapped one of their knees with a loud metallic **clang** and remarked "Hah! Who cares about money when there's innocent people to save! We're going to do it simply because we want to, and we've got the capabilities."


	10. DOOM 2

(POV: Clockwork Knight Adamant)

It had been about thirty hours since I first met that green-armored individual. Since that time, my children had established a respectable starting fortress nearly a kilometer across, we'd proceeded to flood the environment nearby with so much Holy Mana that Daemons coming within twenty kilometers were starting to physically disintegrate just from being in the area, and we'd organized reconnaissance-in-force in patrols of fifty Knights and a couple VTOL gunships strong out to a radius of approximately two hundred kilometers.

It was on one of these patrols when my unit happened upon a sight that we honestly should have expected. Namely, a Hellrift. Immediately, I did my duty and called back to the Prime Beachhead "This is patrol AC33. We're 2.1 degrees clockwise of north at a range of 211 kilometers. We've found a Hellrift with a radius of 120 meters currently deploying Daemonic forces to another realm. Do we close it, or do we take it?"

It took mere seconds to get a reply of "Take and hold that Hellrift! We've authorized an additional force of a thousand Knights and appropriate vehicle support to come help you dig in, but until then your orders are to kill every single Daemon that tries to go through. Do you copy?"

I sent an affirmative response back, and then all Hell _broke_ as we opened fire, using the tactical net to co-ordinate our fire for maximum carnage. Where before I was hard-pressed to keep up with the neverending tide of Daemons all on my own, now I had backup. LOTS of backup. As such, the searing beams of Holy-charged nuclear fire that carved across the canyon the Daemons were charging through thoroughly obliterated the most serious resistance in mere seconds, hundreds of "Hell Knights" and "Skull Launchers" being splattered into paste before they had any chance to react. All we needed to do now was hold the line against an unceasing stream of Daemons and take out the portal operators before they got the bright idea to close the rift.

I immediately volunteered for this, saying "I'm taking point on cleaning out the portal's operators. More volunteers for that would be appreciated."

Five more Knights came with me for this, and we blinked down into the canyon in search of stragglers. Almost immediately, we came across a tall sinister-looking Daemon with an enlarged cranium and spiky pauldrons. As said Daemon saw us approach, they immediately began trying to conjure up more Daemons. I immediately stated over the tac-net "Found an officer. We're taking this one alive for interrogation."

* * *

(POV: Third Person near a recently captured Arch-Vile)

The interrogation room was, generally speaking, rather barren. There were four metal walls, a floor, and a ceiling playing host to lighting strips. On one side of the only table in the room sat a Clockwork Knight. On the other side, an Arch-Vile was cuffed in place to keep them from causing trouble during the interrogation.

As they sat down, the Clockwork Knight noted "Words of Truth is now active. As such, deception will be impossible for the duration of the interrogation. First question, what is your name?"

Immediately, the Arch-Vile replied "I refuse to answer this question."

The Clockwork hummed for a few moments, before noting "Is there any particular _reason_ for your refusal to answer, or are you simply being obstinate?"

Sneering, the Demon replied "We both know that you plan on killing me as soon as the interrogation ends. As long as that does not change, I will provide no useful information."

To this, the Clockwork replied "That is entirely contingent on your co-operation. In exchange for providing all the useful information you have, you will be kept as a prisoner of war instead of terminated. We will ensure that basic survival needs are met, and will only apply the force necessary to keep you confined. This is your final offer; either start talking or we start over with someone who will."

With that, the Arch-Vile grinned before saying "Understood. In answer to your first question, I am Degmanir. I am what is referred to as an Arch-Vile, and here's what I know about the current campaign."

The interrogation continued in this vein for several hours, the Clockworks quickly extracting every single piece of useful information from the Arch-Vile in question. As soon as that was done, Degmanir was shown to the newly constructed prison facility to remain in confinement for the foreseeable future.

* * *

(POV: Clockwork Knight Adamant)

While that Daemon we captured was getting hauled off to an interrogation facility and the additional forces we'd called for got to reinforcing the Hellrift, I and the rest of Patrol AC33 got ready to go on an interdimensional excursion. As we approached the portal, I asked one of my great-grandchildren "So, ready to go save a bunch of people from a Daemonic invasion?"

To this, Carrie replied "Absolutely." and with that we charged forwards through the rift. Moments later, we came out in the wreckage of what obviously used to be a city, and immediately got to ripping through every Daemon in sight. We had our beachhead, and we were going to make use of it to the best of our ability.

About twenty minutes of carnage later, I came across the interesting sight of a fireteam that most definitely _weren't_ Clockworks shooting various weapons into the group of Daemons we were engaging from their opposite flank. A quick check of the Thematograph indicated that while they themselves weren't Daemonic, their gear was using tightly controlled Daemon energy for power. Interesting; I guess if they didn't have any better options they might turn to that out of desperation.

A few moments after finishing mulching the group of Daemons in question, I stowed my weapons aside from my shield before walking out into an open sightline. As I did so, I waved and called out "Greetings!"

Casually stepping on the remains of several Daemons and crushing them as I approached, I activated Words of Truth and said at high volume "I am Clockwork Knight Adamant. I've recently arrived in this region of the multiverse and started a campaign against the local hell dimension! I would like to speak with you! May I come up?"

After a few moments, one of the soldiers up on the balcony answered "Permission granted. We've already radioed command, so don't try anything."

With that, I teleported up next to the fireteam. As the troopers suddenly whirled around before lowering their weapons, I noted "Sorry for surprising you with the sudden teleport. Anyway, I've already given the basic introduction, but here's the more pertinent points. I am a Clockwork, a self-replicating sapient combat automaton created by the Socialist Republic of Amali in a far-flung part of the multiverse. We managed to fight off our local hell dimension, but in the process there was an unexpected dimensional anomaly that deposited me in the Hell you're currently having trouble with. My progeny and I are going to do everything in our power to put a stop to the current invasion and save as many people as possible, but we will be far more effective if allowed to co-ordinate with your organization. Yes, I know you've had your radio transmitting for this entire monolog."

There was a brief pause as the three men and two women in the squad stared at me for a brief moment. Then one of the men (blonde hair barely visible beneath helmet visor, green eyes, power-lifter's physique) hesitantly introduced themselves as "Sergeant Rod Jones. I'm with ARC; basically when the Demons invaded Doctor Hayden got all the militaries together and rolled us into ARC, and our clusterfuck of a military has been fighting an ever-encroaching Demonic force ever since."

_Interesting, slight terminology differences regarding hellspawn. Well, I suppose I might as well use the local term._

Simulating a nod, I asked "Would you mind putting my patrol in contact with your high command then? There are Demons that need killing and the sooner we get properly co-ordinated the more good we can do."

With that Marie (one of the gunships attached to my patrol) landed and opened her side bay doors, revealing a good twenty Clockworks sitting on the benches inside. As she did so, she asked "Hey gramps! Made some new friends?"

As the five ARC soldiers looked on in total confusion and disbelief, I noted "I probably should have mentioned that my patrol is fifty Knights strong and has attached air transport."


	11. Earth Bet 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nukes aren't toys! Treat them with respect in your fics.

**(** POV: Third Person near Contessa)

_Step 201: set Dial-a-Yield to maximum_

In a warehouse on an otherwise uninhabited Earth, Contessa was tinkering around with a piece of military hardware stolen from Earth Resh. It would be needed to fulfill Doctor Mother's orders to eliminate this "Clockwork Knight Catherine" by any means necessary.

_Step 202: wire deadman signal receiver for initiator_

It had already been proven that Parahumans would be nearly useless at directly engaging Catherine, and the idea of using conventional forces was... unworkable, to put it mildly.

_Step 203: ready trapdoor beneath warhead_

Fortunately, conventionals weren't the only option, as proven by the massive hundred-megaton thermonuclear warhead she was currently getting ready to deploy.

_Step 204: say "Door to Toronto beneath trapdoor."_

* * *

(POV: Clockwork Knight Catherine)

I was actually checking on a small child's scraped knee from a skating accident when I felt a small disturbance in my jamming field. Looking around, I quickly spotted a portal directly above me with a massive object falling through. Then the portal snapped shut and near-instantly the object started to glow with heat and Gamma rays. Barely a microsecond had passed, and already I knew that the falling device was a massive nuclear warhead in the process of initiating.

No time for anything physical, in mere milliseconds I and everyone here would be naught but vapor if this continued, but stopping a nuke in the process of going off was something I flat-out couldn't do. As I put my full power into accelerating my thoughts, I racked my brain for a solution to the problem. In fact, I almost wished I currently had a physically supported consciousness instead of being a Mana construct, because then my thoughts would be giving me extra Mana to work with instead of consuming it.

Wait, that's it. Souls are literally just the result of Mana patterning itself on a physically supported mind, thus allowing their consciousness to continue past the destruction of their original substrate. If I could just ensoul everyone here in the right way, they'd be able to carry on as Mana-based beings even after being obliterated. However, getting that much Mana is going to take WAY more energy than I can generate in such a short time.

My thoughts drifted back towards the rapidly expanding ball of nuclear fire that was currently a meter or so past the initial confines of the warhead. It had MORE than enough energy to work with. By spending half my reserve Mana I'd be able to enchant the blast to do the job of ensouling its victims, given how well a massive nuclear explosion synched with Atomic Clockwork thematics. However, this presented a new problem.

Namely, even if I converted everyone to Mana-based lifeforms, they would then need a constant supply of Mana to survive, and there flat out wouldn't be enough on the entirety of Earth Bet to keep everyone from starving until I got enough generation up and running. There had to be a solution for that... Wait, I'm using a nuclear explosion as the spell focus, with Atomic as the primary Thematic at play. I can just give everyone a tiny internal spark of nuclear fire and enchant their mana-based forms to harvest the resulting energy to self-sustain.

So, without further delay I immediately liberated half of my reserve Mana, equal to several hours of my normal output. I then shoved this massive surge into my general-purpose spell core. I could feel the hardware explosively disintegrating from sheer overload as I bludgeoned reality into compliance. Still, I managed to direct the massive surge of magic into the nuclear fireball, my thematograph indicating that I'd mostly succeeded in cursing the nuclear fireball to fail at actually killing anyone.

Still, that left me with the problem of getting myself out of here. I already was a Mana construct, and one with a theme tightly coupling my continued existence to the integrity of my hardware besides. I needed some way to keep my brain intact through this, and I'd already burned out my spell core, so I couldn't massively overload it again on a force field or something. The only other hardware that might do the job was my teleporter, and that had a range of only fifty meters under typical conditions.

...Under _typical_ conditions. I'd already massively overloaded one system to the point that it blew apart into mono-atomic dust, why not my Blink module too? The range for Blink travel scaled with Mana input after all. For that matter, I'd go even further if I only teleported the absolute minimum of systems, since the Mana requirements also scaled with the volume to be transported. So I edited the settings on my Blink module to transport only my brain, one Repair Node, and one of my two reactors. That done, I dumped every single remaining scrap of reserve Mana I had into my teleportation effect.

Abruptly, every last sense I had aside from my repair readout cut out as I left behind the vast majority of my mass to be vaporized in a nuclear fireball. Still, the fact that I was still alive to think at all indicated that my plan worked and I hadn't gotten stuck in Pseudo-Space. As my self-repair system worked to bring me back to full functionality, I took the time to figure out what exactly I was going to do. Someone had just tried to kill me, and they were willing to kill millions of innocent civilians to do it. They needed to be stopped by any means necessary.

There was also the VERY concerning matter of the extradimensional group responsible for Parahuman powers. Before being nuked, I'd read the documentation, and it was clear that the way Parahuman powers were distributed was tailor-made to destroy society. I needed to lock down Earth Bet from their access ASAP.

As such, I changed the settings for my self-repair system. Namely, instead of trying to restore the Knight chassis template, I loaded the files for the _Battleship_ configuration.

Enough fucking around, time to make some changes to the way things work around here.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Emily Piggot)

Emily Piggot had been happily experimenting with her newfound magic on one of the PRT department's firing ranges for the past two hours or so. She'd already managed basic force fields, a few different magical ranged attacks, low-level telekinesis, and a couple simple conjuration tricks. As such, the power testers had swiftly arrived, Bureaucrats had followed and there was currently a massive argument over whether Emily was going to be classified as a Parahuman.

As far as Emily was concerned, such a classification was unthinkable, and she vehemently argued against it, stating "I am not a Parahuman. According to Catherine, the Mana I'm using is spreading uncontrollably, and within two years literally anyone will be able to pull off those tricks I just did and more."

At this, the infuriating pin-stripe wearing paper-pusher currently sneering at Emily remarked "That might be the case. However, as it stands, you currently are capable of demonstrating capabilities not explainable by normal human skill and mundane equipment. As such, you will be required to join the Protectorate roster if you intend on remaining in the PRT's employ."

Idly making a tiny ball of light and setting it to orbiting her hand, Emily remarked "If you do that, I'll make it a personal mission to teach Mana usage to as many PRT directors as possible. Let's see the Protectorate roster handle that sort of change."

The bureaucrat didn't get a chance to reply, since the room suddenly lit up WHITE with a deafening BANG. Emily could clearly sense a massive pulse of Mana accompanying the explosion a fraction of a second before she briefly lost her physical senses. She felt herself falling, and when the light died down enough to see after nearly a minute, she found herself at the bottom of a massive crater still glowing with heat along with hundreds of seemingly unharmed PRT personnel, plenty of other people dotting the landscape further away. Then she took a closer look at her colleagues as she helped one of the power-testers to their feet.

Everyone was radiating Mana in large amounts. Couple this with a surreptitious experiment showing that she could physically phase her hands through each other, and Emily had a sneaking suspicion about what just happened.

So, when one of the troopers from Ellisburg asked to no-one in particular, "Ugh, what just happened?" Emily had an answer.

Namely, she gestured around at the devastation, answering "I'm pretty sure we just died in a nuclear fireball, though apparently we somehow got off on a technicality."


	12. Potterverse 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Big timeskip here.

**Potterverse 3**

(POV: Third Person near Harry Potter)

Harry was currently asleep, though he wasn't aware of this fact. Instead, he was aware of Beryl telling him "I made a mistake adopting you. Get in the rocket."

In the distorted nightmarish version of the moon dome, Harry cried out "No! I want to stay here with you!"

The darkened Beryl turned towards Harry, her three mechanical eyes totally devoid of feeling as she said in Uncle Vernon's voice "You listen to me, boy! You are going in that rocket!" before lashing out with blinding speed and grabbing him by the wrist.

Harry woke up shuddering in his new bedroom. The sheets were warm and fuzzy, the mini-fabber for decorations was still on the desk next to the personal computer, and the space suit was hung neatly on its pole. As for Beryl, she immediately pulled Harry into a hug, pulling him in to squish against her moderately-sized breasts even as her long brown hair gently settled. After a few moments, Beryl asked "Did you have another nightmare?"

Looking up into the eyes of Beryl's new Mediator-class Chassis, Harry nodded as he answered "Yeah..."

Releasing Harry from the hug, Beryl's antenna changed angles slightly, giving an impression somewhere between the pointed ears of a Tolkienian elf and a cat who was somewhat concerned. As she did so, she asked "Do you want to tell me about it?"

Another nod from Harry, before he told the story of his horrific dream, tears streaking down his face as he told every sordid detail. This whole time, Beryl was there for him, gently rubbing his back between the sobs. After a few moments, Beryl said "Don't worry, the nightmares aren't real. I won't be leaving you. Anyway, Jerry made breakfast if you want to come downstairs."

A few seconds later, Harry answered "Yes mum." got up from the bed and followed Beryl to the commissary, the magical nanotech pajamas he wore cleaning him as he walked. When he got there, Jerry (a bright red Clockwork Knight in a chef's hat) called out from behind the counter "Okay kids, this morning's breakfast is ready. We've got fried potato patties, yogurt, scrambled eggs, and cubed melons. Drinks include synthmilk and orange juice."

As Harry walked up to the counter and started loading his breakfast tray with food, he asked the Clockwork cook "How'd stargazing go?"

Chuckling, Jerry answered "Stargazing went great! With the rest of the astronomy club I got that new space telescope with the hundred meter aperture up and running last rest period. We've found a few planets around distant stars already even without that, and the explorers are already gearing up to send a probe to this one red dwarf we've found with seven semi-Earthlike planets."

As he finished loading up his tray, Harry replied "Neat! Think there'll be any field trips soon?"

To this, Jerry shrugged and remarked "No clue. Now go eat before your food gets cold."

A few moments later, Harry sat down at one of the tables directly across from Rachel, a seven year old girl who'd found herself unceremoniously nominated Big Sister by both Harry and a Chinese girl by the name of Biyu. A few hours under Words of Truth to learn each others' languages, and they were able to talk without issue. Either way, as he sat down, Rachel asked "You look like you had a rough night Harry. Nightmares again?"

After a moment, Harry nodded, prompting Biyu to gently put a hand on his shoulder and ask "Want to talk about something happier? For instance, I'm wondering what classes we'll be having today. Personally, I'm hoping for combat training, since I really enjoy the obstacle courses and other activities."

Smiling, Harry said "Yeah, combat training is fun, but I'm really hoping for more casting practice. According to mum I'm starting to develop enough atomic clockwork theming that my insides will start going cyborg soon."

Idly playing with a tiny ice spell between her fingers and zapping it with tiny bolts of lightning, Rachel couldn't help but chuckle as she said "True, that's always a blast. Still, we did casting practice yesterday, and the teachers don't tend to have the same thing multiple days in a row."

That's when Beryl made her presence known at the front of the room again and said "Guess what kids? Today's a Practical Sciences day. In particular, today's subject is nuclear reactions. Once we've all learned the theoreticals, everyone's going to be designing thermonuclear warheads based on what they learned, and we'll use them to blow up some asteroids. Now who's excited?"

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Ramy Al Sayed)

It was a cold night in Cairo, as Ramy looked up at the stars. The moon looked a bit bluer than it used to, but Ramy was more concerned with finding a safe alley to sleep in tonight. It wasn't supposed to be this way, the Sayeds were the largest magical family in Egypt, and he'd been the heir apparent. Then it turned out that he couldn't do magic, and Ramy had been turned out onto the streets with the none-too-subtle impression that his family wanted him to die in a ditch somewhere.

That was six years ago. With no legal identity, no money, no job, no education, and no way to acquire any of the above, Ramy had found himself living a life of begging and petty theft just to survive. He'd occasionally considered tracking down his estranged family and lobbing a firebomb through their window, but that wouldn't solve anything. Also, they were wizards, and had probably enchanted their homes to prevent that sort of thing.

So, Ramy simply set down his bag, unrolled the tattered old sleeping bag he'd managed to come by a few years ago, and settled in to sleep. That's when he heard a man ask "Do you need any assistance? That can't be comfortable." without the slightest hint of sarcasm or mockery in their voice.

Turning to look, Ramy was shocked to see not the young man he'd expected, but a three-eyed mechanical being sitting in the alley next to him with their legs crossed. After a few seconds, Ramy asked "Was it you who just spoke?"

At this, the machine nodded and said "Yes. I am Clockwork Knight Kles. You seem to be rather down on your luck, and I was wondering if I could help." Again, there wasn't the slightest hint of sarcasm or malice, and Ramy simply didn't know what to think of it.

After a few moments, Ramy bitterly said "If you could give me a future worth having, that would be appreciated. My family tossed me out when it turned out I couldn't use magic, and I've got no way to meet any of the requirements for joining society properly. I'm stuck. I don't know why I'm telling you all this."

Indeed, he didn't know why he was saying this. Perhaps he simply needed someone to vent to, and he wasn't quite as worried about being judged by a machine than he was about being judged by another human.

After another few moments, Kles noted "I could actually help you with that, though it involves bringing you somewhere other than Egypt. I am not the only Clockwork. We're building a new society on the moon, and willing to take in anyone who wishes to come. If you're willing to come with me, you'll be in a place where all necessities for a fulfilling life are provided free of charge simply because taking care of people is the entire point of having a society in the first place." Again, not the slightest hint of deception whatsoever.

After thinking about it for a few seconds, Ramy asked "How are you getting to the moon? I didn't think that was even possible."

Simulating a nod, Kles answered in complete sincerity "The first few trips were made using rockets, but we've finally got a Pathway hub set up. I just need a minute or so to make the receiving frame, and I can open a door straight to the moon for the both of us."

Silently, Ramy simply nodded. Kles got the hint almost immediately and retrieved a few parts from... somewhere that they began fitting together into something very much like a doorframe with a button off to one side. After a few moments, the frame was suddenly filled with light revealing a beautiful hanging garden under a clear ceiling, rows of archway frames between the plants. Inside, Ramy could see various people milling about, both human and Clockwork.

After a few moments of Ramy simply staring in awe, Kles noted "It's a door, not a window. It won't take you anywhere if you don't go through it."

And so, after a few moments, Ramy stepped through the portal.

* * *

(POV: Mel, Mediator)

My visit to Moscow was currently going fairly well, all things considered. I was currently wearing a Mediator-Class Chassis inspired by what Beryl had come up with for childcare purposes, though I'd opted for slightly smaller breasts on account of not needing the added huggability cushioning, along with electric blue hair. Either way, I was here on official business; it had taken a few weeks, but I finally had an appointment scheduled with the Politburo. Hopefully they were more reasonable than that Reagan man Xifen had to deal with; apparently the meeting hadn't gone very well.

Musings aside, I'd arrived about half an hour ahead of schedule, and had spent the time idly analyzing the architectural style of the room I was waiting in. I was pretty sure I'd pinpointed where all the structure's load-bearing members were and figured out a bunch of other things regarding how the building was constructed, but I had no intention of exploiting that knowledge at the moment. Either way, right on schedule a functionary came in and informed me "The politburo will see you now."

Nodding as I stood up, I said "Thank you for telling me. Is this the correct room number?" as I held out a note that had been printed regarding where and when the meeting would take place.

Looking at the note, the man told me "No, the meeting was moved due to unexpected plumbing troubles that resulted in the room in question being closed for maintenance. Follow me."

I did so, and soon found myself in a meeting room with six members of the Soviet Politburo. I could recognize Mikhail Gorbachev, Vitaly Vorotnikov, Andrei Gromyko, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Eduard Shevardnadze. Apparently the rest had other business they were attending to at the moment, which was fair. Apparently Politburo members were also involved in other organizations as a matter of course.

As I sat down, I introduced myself, the typical formalities were observed, and after a few moments I began my presentation, using projection spells to provide the visual aids. Topics covered included the spread of Mana, how teaching Conjuration to the people would improve living standards across the entire Soviet Union, the impending collapse of the Wizarding World's ability to maintain secrecy and the bloodbath we were trying to prevent, and offers to provide economic and educational support.

When I was done, I turned towards the men staring at me in something resembling awe and asked "So, sorry for the half hour of non-stop talking; I don't actually have lungs, so it didn't occur to me to stop for breath. Does anyone have any questions?"


	13. Outer Wilds (one-shot setting)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Decided I didn't much like writing in Halkeginia. Therefore re-purposed its slot for 'one-shot' settings

(POV: Clockwork Knight Marina)

I arrived in extremely close proximity to a star, barely having time to process my impending doom before I collided with a large space station at a few dozen meters per second. Grabbing on for dear life, I quickly clambered around the outside of the space station until I eventually found an entrance. As soon as that happened I climbed inside, feeling great relief at no longer being in immediate danger of falling into the sun. Huh, looks like there's some writing around here, along with a few long-dead skeletons. I suppose I might as well do some reading while I was here.

While it did take a bit of fiddling with Words of Truth to get the text legible, I was both enraged and saddened when I learned that the station I was on was designed to explode a sun as some sort of science experiment. Clearly, these people were absolutely crushed by their failure. I was just about to leave when someone in a brown patched-together space suit showed up and shouted at me "The sun explodes in fifteen minutes! Get to Timber Hearth and evacuate everyone there, I'll collect the rest of the astronauts. Meet the other astronauts at the White Hole Station, I'll be at the Eye of the Universe, now go!"

With that, the space-suited figure booked it at their top speed, and I followed. As I ran, I reconfigured myself for vacuum travel; the _instant_ I was clear of the sun station, I started boosting prograde, soon getting away from the star. Apparently this universe had a higher gravitational constant, because damn that star was _tiny_. Similarly, so were the planets. Admittedly I didn't know just from being yelled at which one was Timber Hearth, but seeing as only one planet had an entirely breathable atmosphere and a visible village, I immediately made my trajectory there, budding off a massive shuttle around myself as I went.

Diving through the atmosphere, I touched down right in the middle of the village and immediately jumped out. I swiftly saw everyone backing away, and in response I fired up Words of Truth at maximum power as I shouted "The sun will explode in just over ten minutes! Get everyone onto the ship in five minutes along with the absolutely necessary provisions; I can duplicate them with a starting sample! Now hurry!" I couldn't afford for a single person to doubt me on this.

Immediately, everyone started dashing around, and I grabbed one particular Hearthian as I asked "Do you know if there are any others outside the village on this planet?"

Looking up at me, the terrified Hearthian answered "Yes, Tektite went to investigate a disturbance at Youngbark Crater and someone needs to go get him!"

Simulating a nod, I answered "Understood, I will go." With that I activated my Blink module to teleport fifty meters straight up and activated my thruster array, quickly scooting around the entire tiny planet until I found a crater that fit the bill with a Hearthian heat signature inside. As soon as I did so, I touched down next to the shocked Hearthian and asked "Are you Tektite?"

At this, the four-eyed alien simply nodded, before I said "Hold on tight, the sun's going to explode in a few minutes, and I'm evacuating everyone."

With that, I spent a little reserve Mana to overclock my Blink module and teleport the both of us right back to the village. As I entered the ship, I quickly counted the sixteen Hearthians in the hold now and asked "Is everyone here?"

After a few moments, everyone eventually agreed "Yes, we're all here."

In response, I replied "Understood, then we're blasting off to wait for your astronauts to meet us at the White Hole Station." and with that I fired the thrusters for the evacuation ship, the vessel shaking as we ascended. As far as actually finding the White Hole Station was concerned, that was easy as it could be. So, I parked the ship over there. Sure enough, a minute or so later two different spacecraft of Hearthian origin arrived. I quickly modified the evacuation ship to have them docked, and started boosting out of the solar system at maximum thrust. Then I noticed the head count reporting the time-looping Hearthian as missing, along with a radio signal from deep space calling out in their voice.

* * *

(POV: The Hearthian)

This was the third loop during which I had encountered Clockwork Knight Marina, and the second during which I had coordinated the evacuation. The first time I spent utterly confused and asking the Clockwork a massive number of questions; by the time we'd arrived at a course of action it was too late, and the sun consumed the station with both of us on it. The second time we had successfully managed to get everyone past the reach of the supernova, only for me to find myself getting pulled back in time regardless.

Another several loops passed as I tracked down a way to turn off the Ash Twin Project and rehearsed how I would rescue Feldspar from the Dark Bramble. I had quickly determined that the added time it took for me to get into the Ash Twin Project would make getting Feldspar out using my ship rather impractical given the time constraints involved and the need to avoid the Anglerfish. On the other hand, I knew where the Nomai Vessel was, and the Ash Twin Project had a compatible Warp Core. For that matter, I knew the co-ordinates to reach the Eye of the Universe, so I might as well also retrieve Solanum from the Quantum Moon while I was at it.

This was the final loop. The absolute first thing I did was rocket off to where Chert was camped out on Ember Twin. As soon as I landed next to him, I told him "Chert, the sun explodes in twenty minutes. I need you to get Esker, Gabbro and Riebeck to the White Hole Station for evacuation, especially Esker and Gabbro, since Esker doesn't have a ship and Gabbro misplaced his."

Chert immediately startled and asked "Are you sure? And what about everyone else?"

Nodding, I said "I'm sure. As for everyone on Timber Hearth, there's someone arriving on the Sun Station who can handle that as soon as I get there. Now go!"

Immediately, Chert got up and dashed for his ship. Meanwhile, I sprinted for mine and made the hop to Ash Twin; I could hypothetically do this faster using my ship, but that put me at risk of losing it, and I still needed it. So as soon as the sand levels got low enough I dashed through the door for the tower, over the still-buried cacti, and through the teleporter to the Sun Station. Quickly I sprinted through the corridors, EVA'd across the gap, and encountered Marina in her blue-painted glory.

I still wasn't quite clear how she understood me, but when I shouted "The sun explodes in fifteen minutes! Get to Timber Hearth and evacuate everyone there, I'll collect the rest of the astronauts. Meet the other astronauts at the White Hole Station, I'll be at the Eye of the Universe, now go!" she didn't need to ask for confirmation, she just started moving.

Now was when our paths diverged, Marina rocketing off to Timber Hearth even as I dashed back through the teleporters to get at the core of the Ash Twin Project. I had the apocalypse-powered time machine shut down in less than forty seconds, and with its warp core in hand I made a mad dash for my ship and into the depths of Dark Bramble. Now came the tricky part.

The fog was thick and gloomy, occasionally revealing horrifying Anglerfish through the viewport. Still, my signalscope pulled through, and I managed to reach Feldspar's camp in fairly short order. As soon as I did so I told him "Feldspar, get in my ship now! The sun's exploding in about six minutes and I'm not leaving without you!"

He barely had time to argue before I started shoving him into the ship and he got the hint. As soon as I was back in the ship and navigating towards the Nomai vessel, he asked "So Hatchling, where are we going, and what's this Nomai doohickey with the two boxes on the ends?"

As I navigated past the trio of Anglerfish I answered "That's an Advanced Warp Core, and we're taking it to the vessel the Nomai arrived in. We'll be using it to warp right out of here; everyone else should be clear of the blast by now."

Mildly surprised, Feldspar asked "You know how to fly a Nomai starship?"

Shrugging as the Vessel came into view, I answered "Well, I've only ever flown their shuttles, but I have a pretty solid idea of how to work Nomai technology. You grab the radio and I'll grab the warp core, we're entering through that hull breach."

With that, we fueled up our jetpacks, opened the hatch, and exited my ship for the last time. I navigated us through the corpse-filled corridors with ease, quickly arriving at the warp core socket. The process of warping the ship took a mere forty seconds including entering the coordinates for the Eye of the Universe. The wormhole opened, and after the wrenching distortion of warp travel we were clear of Dark Bramble.

I let go of tension I didn't know I was holding, and said "If the radio's on, everyone should be coming to meet us on the evac ship in a little while. In the meantime, feel free to ask whatever you like."

* * *

(POV: Solanum)

On the surface of the Quantum Moon's sixth location, Solanum waited, unsure of how much time had passed. The fact that her shuttle had started flickering around the Moon when not observed was a distinctly unsettling one, as it indicated that she had been present here for far longer than she had thought. As a direct corollary of that point, the prospect of getting on the shuttle and leaving the Quantum Moon seemed particularly unwise.

Lost in thought, Solanum wondered if she would be stuck here forever, before she suddenly noticed an oddity in the form of the moon's ambient light briefly reaching a blinding searing blue before dimming to nothing, though for all she knew it could have been much longer. That was in and of itself distinctly worrying, as it indicated that something rather bizarre had happened to the system's star. It was the only source of light here on the Quantum Moon, after all.

Before the panic could get _too_ severe however, Solanum found herself treated to a rather bizarre sight in the form of two figures walking towards her. The first was clearly a space-suited individual of a species she did not recognize, while the other was a large, bulky machine, loaded down with weaponry.

The mechanical being turned towards Solanum and inexplicably glowed golden yellow, saying "Greetings. I am Clockwork Knight Marina. My companion and I have made this journey to the Quantum Moon in order to rescue you."

Solanum thought furiously for a moment, before asking "How do you know my language? I have never met either of your species before, and if you had any contact with living Nomai at least one of them would be with your rescue party."

The answer Solanum got was far from what she expected, as the mechanical being replied "I do not know your language, and am not speaking it. Instead, I am locally altering the underlying nature of reality so as to facilitate communication without need of such things. As a side effect, deception is completely impossible while this effect is in place. In addition, you are correct in your inference that we have not met any living Nomai aside from yourself. All Nomai in-system aside from yourself perished completely roughly 2.4*10^5 years ago. The cause was a highly dangerous form of exotic matter released from a comet that had recently been captured by the system primary."

There was a pause for several moments, as Solanum digested this information, before she noted "That would be consistent with my hypothesis that I am not entirely alive, as bizarre as that may sound. It does raise the question of how you knew enough to come find me here, though."

That is when the space-suited visitor spoke up, noting "That would be on account of my actions, mostly. On account of the sun naturally going supernova, I wound up paired with the Ash Twin Project, getting caught up in the resulting time loop. This is not the first loop in which I have found you here on the Quantum Moon, but it _is_ the first time that the evacuation was a complete success."

Unexpectedly, Solanum found herself heaving, unsure if she was laughing or crying as the full impact of what she had just been told slammed home. Every other Nomai in the system was dead, and she was mostly dead. Indeed, the only reason these people were even here to talk to her was on account of all her friends and family dying before they could disassemble the Ash Twin Project.

After a few minutes of this, the last of the Nomai asked "If all the Nomai are dead, then why are you even bothering to rescue me? I'm just an unliving relic of a race long gone. For that matter, how are you even planning to do so? After all, leaving the sixth position will just put me into one of my deceased quantum states."

At this, the Clockwork Knight spoke up, noting "We are here to rescue you because no matter what, no sapient being deserves to be trapped and alone for all eternity. An additional factor is that there is evidence for the survival of other Nomai clans aside from your own. As for how, we've already determined that getting you out physically is non-viable, so the only option is to extract you as a mind-state and put you in a new body. As it happens, I have a pretty good idea of how to achieve that, though I will only do so with your consent."

Regaining a bit of composure, Solanum asked "How long until the clone will be ready? I don't want to be stuck here any longer than absolutely necessary."

Marina answered "Your new body will be less of a clone and more of a Mana construct, so making it will be extremely quick. That said, to ensure that it is actually you inhabiting it and not simply a mind-twin will require your body here to die. Additional local alterations to the laws of reality have been made to ensure that it will actually be you waking up in your new body as a result."

Solanum hesitated, before she answered "Do it."

Marina replied "This will hurt only briefly." before suddenly drawing their sword and decapitating Solanum in a flicker of motion.

The next thing Solanum knew, she was waking up in a soft bed.

In front of her sat both Marina and the Hearthian who had been caught in the time loop, both looking at her. The Hearthian asked "How do you feel, Solanum?"

Thinking for a few moments, Solanum simply answered "I feel alive."

* * *

(POV: Clockwork Knight Marina)

I'd expanded the evacuation ship to comfortably hold all the Hearthians and Solanum in the orbit of the Eye of the Universe, complete with a habitat bay designed to be mostly comfortable to the Hearthians making up most of my passengers. Now it was simply a matter of deciding what to do next.

As the stars blinked out one by one, I noted "So, this universe is obviously dying. Obviously sticking around isn't a good idea, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to punch a rift to elsewhere."

After a few moments, Solanum asked "Is that really necessary? The Eye of the Universe is right there, and it seems to have a stable wormhole in the form of that quantum vortex."

Nodding, I answered "The problem is where that wormhole leads. Namely, it leads to a pocket of weirdly altered pseudo-space that will react to a conscious mind to make a new universe. I can absolutely guarantee that whoever jumps in the Eye of the Universe won't survive the process, and the universe it creates won't reach habitable conditions for an unacceptably long time."

After a few moments, Esker commented "Well, you seem pretty set on that solution of yours, so you might as well get on with it. That said, it'd be polite to leave the portal open once we're through and set up a beacon saying where the exit is so any stragglers aren't stuck."


	14. Star Wars 3

(POV: Third Person near Sheev Palpatine)

In his high-class apartment on Coruscant, Sheev Palpatine was currently monitoring the situation for any unexpected occurrences that could upset his plans, and preparing contingencies accordingly. Which is to say, he was watching publicly available news broadcasts while making sarcastic commentary. He had just gotten up for a few minutes to grab a bowl of Grumbits (Enjoy the spicy, cheesy flavor!)(Name trademarked by Grumbocorp), and apparently missed a minute or so of prattle.

Either way, instead of the normal announcer there was apparently an interview taking place between some Twi'Lek host Sheev didn't care to remember the name of, and an extremely heavily armed three-eyed combat droid.

As Sheev sat down with his bowl of cheap crunchy snacks, the Twi'Lek asked _"So, can we hear that speech you prepared?"_

Hearing this, Palpatine snorted; why a _Droid_ was being asked to present a speech was beyond him.

At this, the Droid replied _"Certainly"_ and the camera zoomed in on them. Then the Droid started their speech _"I am Clockwork Knight Hazen, speaking in an official capacity for the Clockwork Legion. While we did not anticipate our arrival in this galaxy, we will uphold our mission of protecting the innocent no matter our location. So when we found out that slavery is still practiced in its most brutal of forms, we decided our course of action almost immediately."_

At this point, Hazen held up a clear bag for the camera, containing a chunk of metal covered in dried bodily fluids. As they did so, they noted _"This is a slave leash implant, surgically removed from one of the many slaves we have already rescued. It is a remote-controlled explosive device and tracking beacon used to prevent slaves from escaping; upon receiving the detonation signal it will explosively release approximately four kilojoules of energy, dealing lethal damage to its victim in a gruesome manner. As far as we can ascertain, over one trillion sapient beings currently have these devices implanted. That is nearly ten percent of the total galactic population going by the best estimates available."_

Continuing, Hazen noted _"This practice is currently extant throughout much of the Outer Rim, and significant portions of the Mid Rim. That said, the single biggest concentration of slaves is in the region informally referred to as Hutt space. As the Galactic Republic seems perfectly willing to treat this region as somewhere between an autonomous province and a sovereign country, we shall do the same. Therefore, I hereby declare the Clockwork Legion to be formally in a state of war against the Hutt families and any who align with them."_

Sheev almost choked on one of his snacks as the implications slammed home. The galaxy wasn't supposed to be at war for a decade yet! Even worse, he had almost no control over either of the sides involved in this conflict, and he'd never even _heard_ of this Clockwork Legion before.

Then if it was even remotely possible, Hazen turned even more serious as they stated _"To the slaving scum who made this necessary, understand that we are not driven by territorial gains or the pursuit of power for its own sake. You. Are. Hurting. People. Until that is no longer the case, we cannot be bargained with, we cannot be reasoned with, and we will not stop, ever, until every single person you dare to claim as your property is safe. If you surrender you will be spared; if you resist, try to hold slaves as hostages, or kill them as an act of spite, we will kill you. This is your only warning."_

Finally coughing up the cheese-flavored snack, Sheev hauled himself to his feet and launched into a tirade of profanity including every single applicable swear word he could think of. In the background he could vaguely hear Hazen prattling on about providing volunteers with training and equipment, but he didn't pay too much attention to it, as he was currently busy ranting at the assortment of houseplants throughout his apartment.

* * *

(POV: Clockwork Battleship Paxo)

After having done the research on how the locals handled space combat, we in the Clockwork Legion had drastically rethought how we went about building capital ships. After all, our capital-class templates had all been designed for atmospheric combat against Grand Dragons, a very different mission profile from deep space engagements against other ships. As such, aside from rather obvious improvements like adopting the local materials science, thrusters, shielding, and other such things before amplifying them massively with Mana, there were a number of other alterations we made.

First off, we were making some pretty major overhauls to the way we built our deep space weaponry, with the primary goal being to out-range basically everyone else. While the C-fractional plasma blasts fired by a Proton Beam were perfectly adequate over atmospheric ranges, they would have a nasty tendency to lose focus at far less than the ranges typical to space combat. As such, we took it upon ourselves to develop something new.

At its core, our new weapon could still broadly be classified as a particle beam with its velocity provided directly by a reaction instead of an accelerator, but the specifics were massively different. First and foremost, instead of Protonium fuel, we were using electrons (or Positrons) conjured so close together that the resulting electrostatic forces accelerated the beam to velocities absurdly close to the speed of light. This took place inside an almost closed capsule-shaped Deconjuration Field, deleting any electron that didn't ultimately end up on a vector aiming out the open end of the barrel.

After exiting the chamber, an electromagnetic lens was used to focus the diffuse cone into a tight beam a few millimeters across at the widest point, which then proceeded to self-focus down to microns thanks to relativistic effects. A few more enchantments were added to make the beam disperse after a miss so it wouldn't hurt innocent people, along with a bit of homing to compensate for any aiming wobble there might happen to be. From there, the beam was passed through a portal ring a few centimeters across to another portal ring mounted in a turret. This allowed the beam generators to remain safely buried inside the hull, along with several other advantages.

Meanwhile, our missiles remained fairly conventional Casaba Howitzer affairs; missiles were missiles. On the other hand, we made a point of fitting all our missile cells with Blink pads so that we could teleport missiles directly to outside the hull without need of a hatch. Also the fact that we were using Conjuration to make missiles as needed meant we could fire as many of them as we wanted.

Far more important was what we'd done with Hyperspace, once we'd figured out how it worked. It had taken several weeks of work, but we'd finally managed to hybridize a Hyperdrive with a Blink unit. Admittedly the end result was rather mediocre as far as actually being a Hyperdrive was concerned, rating about a class six. However, it had a single major advantage: it could effectively ignore the need for a safe and well-plotted route that Hyperdrives typically had to deal with. After all, when it came to an obstacle that would normally cause problems, it could just Blink a few light hours and instantly skip over the hazard. The net effect was that while our Hybrid Drive would lose a race down one of the major Hyperlanes, it would get to the destination faster in pretty much every other case, since unlike a conventional Hyperdrive we could just point directly at the destination and go full speed ahead.

In my case, this all came together in a disc-shaped chassis approximately 1.5 kilometers in diameter and 200 meters thick at the thickest point. My main sublight drives were all directed through the 'top' and 'bottom' of the disc, so that I could use them to dodge while keeping my edge lined up with hostile ships, even aside from the evasive maneuvers I could pull while Blinking. Even if I did happen to get hit, the twenty meters of highly sloped armor and extremely intense shields I was packing on top of massive degrees of compartmentalization and redundancy meant I could stand up to a **lot** of punishment.

The reason that this was all relevant? Because I was currently in hyperspace en route to Nal Hutta along with thirty other Clockwork Battleships like myself and a large number of troopships. The logic being that we might as well start with a decapitation strike and cripple the Hutts' ability to coordinate, and most of the Hutt Cartel's movers and shakers tended to do business on Nal Hutta and its moon.

Either way, when we dropped out of Hyperspace, scans immediately located about two hundred actual no-kidding warships in the system, most of them in orbit of Nar'Shadda. Apparently, the Hutts had thrown money around to buy up a lot of surplus military hardware and hire the mercenaries needed to crew it. That made sense, given that they'd had about forty eight hours since our declaration of war. Immediately, we got into action as we Blinked to a range of 50,000 kilometers and started slagging the weapons emplacements and drives on several ships, aiming to cripple the vessels without causing serious casualties among the crew. Meanwhile, some of our troopships started teleporting Knights and Fighters to the surface of Nar'Shadda and Nal'Hutta; it wasn't like the Hutts could actually _stop_ our teleportation technology, so we might as well exploit it for all it's worth. Boarding operations meanwhile would be delayed until the ships in question were crippled; the Hutt fleet was less of a priority compared to sorting out the messes planetside, and they would be treated as such.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Darth Maul)

On the surface of Nar'Shadda, a certain Zabrak was absolutely furious. Two days ago some jumped up Droids had declared war on the Hutts, prompting much laughter in the bar where he saw the news. The next thing he knew his ship had been commandeered for use as a logistics vessel, leaving him stuck on the crime-ridden ecumenopolis. Adding even more insult to the already massive inconvenience, all the other ships in system had been 'repurposed' as well.

Now he was getting to watch in real time from a ship chartering service's help desk (currently being as unhelpful as possible) as three-eyed combat Droids started appearing out of literally nowhere by the thousands, getting in horrifically one-sided fights with various Hutt enforcers. Quietly, Maul tried to sneak away towards the apartment he was currently lodged in, in hopes of sleeping through this whole mess. He didn't get very far before he heard a synthesized voice ask "So, care to explain why your Thematic Signature is about two steps away from being a solid lump of evil?"

Whirling around as he ignited his dual lightsaber, Maul found himself face to face with one of the three eyed Droids in question. Immediately, he swung, only for the Droid to grab his lightsaber by the blade and hold it in place as they brought their other arm up to Maul's face near instantly. There was a puff of some compressed gas, and the last thing he was aware of before falling unconscious was the Droid noting "You are very lucky we made a point of studying anaesthesia."


	15. DOOM 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always felt those "Oh no we have a major energy crisis we can't solve any other way!" plots were stupid. USE. THE. SUN. If it's good enough for a Kardashev 2 civilization, it's good enough for you! But NO that's never what happens! I've decided to completely skewer that part of the plot with regards to DOOM 2016.

(POV: Clockwork Knight Adamant)

It had taken around six hours to get approval to visit ARC's headquarters, and the flight over to their mobile command center took another three hours as well. Still, after that getting a meeting with Dr. Samuel Hayden was surprisingly quick. It wasn't a private meeting by any means, as several security personnel were present along with various technicians. This was perfectly acceptable, as we wouldn't be discussing anything for which secrecy was absolutely critical at this meeting.

Either way, as we sat down in the meeting room surrounded by various displays, readouts, and other such things, I asked "Should I go first with explaining how we got here, or do you want to go first?"

To this, Doctor Hayden replied "I would like to hear your story first, personally."

Simulating a nod, I began "The first thing you need to know is that the multiverse is larger than you accounted for, and there are multiple realms that could reasonably be described as Hell dimensions. I was originally created on Terra Magnus, a world indirectly ruled by one of these alternate Hell dimensions for nearly a thousand years. Their modus operandi was quite different; instead of outright invading, they enforced oppression, evil, and general misery across the planet's surface in order to sustainably farm soul fragments to make into more Daemons. The agents of this oppression were Grand Dragons, nuclear-powered dragons hundreds of meters in scale and mentally engineered to behave as a belligerent psychotic dictator."

Everyone in the room seemed shocked by this, but I didn't let that slow me down as I continued "That said, there were some places free from the rule of the Grand Dragons. The subterranean races were generally free since Grand Dragons couldn't physically _fit_ down the entrance tunnels to their cities miles below ground. On the surface however, free zones were incredibly scarce, and only emerged when a powerful Titan made it their personal mission to create one."

At this, Doctor Hayden asked "Could you please explain what you mean by a Titan? There is some unfortunately conflicting terminology there."

Another simulated nod, before I answered "Right. All signs point to Terra Magnus being terraformed and life-seeded about twenty thousand years ago by a species of von neumann probe that tend to build themselves into a massive labyrinth subterranean structure. We generally call them Dungeons, however those that build their structures into a mobile form and acquire the truly massive amount of Mana required to animate it receive the title of Titan. Prior to about three years ago, this was an extremely rare phenomenon, as all available Mana sources lacked the sheer portability and scalability of nuclear power. That's when the Titan of Steel created Protonium, and changed the world forever."

Looking somewhat askance, Doctor Hayden asked "You mean that your world has only had nuclear power for three years?"

Simulating another nod, I noted "I think that the Daemons were actively suppressing it while letting most other fields advance relatively unhindered. Aside from that, the Titan and the Republic they founded have a distinct tendency to throw basically unlimited resources at any competent scientist they can find or make, which tends to lead to extremely rapid progress. It's probably the only reason we stood the slightest chance at the Battle Of The Hellrift."

A raised mechanical eyebrow from Hayden was all it took to prompt me to continue. "Basically, the Daemons were getting desperate thanks to us locking down their access using Dimensional Jammers, so they ripped open a multi-kilometer self expanding Hellrift to try and swallow the entire planet. We aren't entirely clear what happened at the end of that, but some variety of unexpected interaction during our attempt to force the rift shut resulted in me being catapulted directly into the Hell dimension you're currently having problems with. After that it was a matter of slaughtering several thousand Demons in a desperate struggle until a man wearing green power armor bought me enough time to self-replicate, and the story is fairly predictable from there."

Briefly, Hayden seemed slightly perturbed at the mention of the man in green. Still, he recovered fairly quickly as he commented "That certainly explains quite a few of the oddities regarding your sudden appearance, at the very least. Presumably you would like to know any relevant information regarding ARC and the Hellish invasion?"

I answered "An overview of the relevant timeline leading up to it would be appreciated. Strategic intelligence can happen through other channels."

After a moment, Hayden nodded and began "Thirty years ago, humanity was suffering a severe energy crisis. We found a solution in the form of an extra-dimensional portal on the surface of Mars leading to what you so eloquently described as a Hell Dimension. We began siphoning off and processing the energy for our own use, which worked excellently as a solution until three years ago. That's when Demons overran the Mars facility and killed almost everyone there, with their advance only being stopped by the violent man in green you mentioned, a being that has been variously referred to as the Doom Slayer, Hell Walker, and various other epithets. In the interim I pulled together the beginnings of what would become ARC when the Demons invaded Earth."

Immediately, the implications clicked and I found myself wanting to violently shake Hayden up and down while yelling at him. Still, I kept my composure and asked "Why didn't you just use the sun? You've got a massive fusion reactor _right there_ that produces orders of magnitude more energy than your civilization consumes, and will keep doing so for billions of years to come. The distribution infrastructure might be a pain to engineer, but it certainly beats leaving open an active portal to an inherently hostile extradimensional power. I am now seriously doubting your decision-making capabilities. You had **better** be lying about your motives and have a better explanation, or else the sensible option would be to handle matters without the individual basically responsible for throwing open the gates to Hell in the first place."

As Samuel Hayden tried to come up with a response, I surreptitiously activated Words of Truth. After a minute or so, Samuel admitted "The extraction of Argent Energy was a cover story for what was actually being done on Mars. Though there _were_ energy deficits at the time, they were minor, and would have shortly been solved by the deployment of additional solar collection as you indicate. However, humanity was completely unprepared for the Demonic invasion that I knew would be coming the instant I heard of the portal on Mars."

Samuel sighed, then continued "By building the facility there, I bought time for humanity to study the Demons' biology, powers, and methods of operation, thus making it much easier to learn how to fight them. When something inevitably went wrong due to personnel suffering Demonic corruption, the Mars facility was a contained environment from which the invasion could not readily escape before the Doom Slayer killed them all. This gave humanity a preview to the invasion that could not be readily ignored, giving me the sway I needed to form the precursors to ARC and give Earth a fighting chance. Still, I miscalculated how much time we would have; if the full invasion had taken two more years to start than it did, things would be going much better than they are."

The various human personnel looked completely stunned at this revelation, but I just felt vindicated that the person I was talking to actually had a brain. As he finished, I noted "That's a lot more sensible than what you were originally claiming. We in the Clockwork Legion will gladly support your defense efforts."

* * *

(POV: The DOOM Slayer)

I'd just finished getting VEGA installed into the Fortress of Doom, and I was getting ready to deploy onto Earth. That's when Vega spoke over the intercom "You have a visitor. One of the constructs you assisted in Hell has arrived, and they have a package for you."

Quickly, I spun around inside the blue and grey control room, and came face-to-face with one of those three eyed robots. Immediately, they held out a long, narrow box, noting "Slayer, as thanks for rescuing our progenitor we have produced a modified omni-rifle for your use."

Huh, it's been a long time since someone outright _gave_ me more weaponry. After a brief shrug, I picked up the box containing the omni-rifle and started examining the weapon, seeing how it shouldered, and... wait, where is the ammo supposed to go in? Seriously, there isn't a magazine well or anything. It's all just seamless metal aside from the barrel, selector switches, readout, and trigger.

Perhaps sensing my confusion, the robot noted "The weapon is self-powered, and conjures munitions directly in the barrel as needed. Do you want a tutorial on its use, or do you want to figure it out as you go?"

I shook my head no, I'd handled thousands of different varieties of firearm over my long career, and one more wouldn't be hard to pick up. Getting the hint, the robot said "Understood. In that case, there are only two warnings I absolutely must share. First, using either particle beam mode near allies is a bad idea unless they are shielded against radiation, though the Holy-charged one is significantly safer in that regard. Second, the missile mode fires variable yield nuclear ordnance. Please exercise caution when learning to gauge the minimum safe distance."

With that, the robot turned to leave as soon as they saw me nod in response. That done, I walked back over to the area where VEGA was preparing the portal. I had an _appointment_ with a certain Hell Priest. Come to think of it, I wonder if the Holy-charged mode that robot mentioned could help me get around the normal requirements for nullifying their protections? If it did, it would certainly save me a lot of time and effort.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near ~~Deag Nilox~~ the Doom Slayer)

Aboard the Hell Barge carried by his personal Thrall Titan, Deag Nilox was planning what part of humanity's pitiful resistance he would demolish next, when suddenly the door to his massive round scheming room was bashed open. The Hell Priest didn't get much of an opportunity to see who just arrived before a stream of extremely intense energy blasts knocked him across the room, reacting violently with the protections he'd placed on himself to wreak even more destruction upon his form. The blasts cut out after a second or so, the withered vile sorcerer feeling his life leaving him even as he rolled himself onto his back to see what was happening.

All he got for his trouble was a green-armored boot pressing down on his chest as he got a full-frontal view of the Doom Slayer bringing the barrel of a somewhat strange-looking rifle to bear. Then the Doom Slayer blew his head off and continued on his way, jumping off the Hell Barge and starting to fight his way through the wreckage of New York City. He had a meeting to crash. Idly, he noted VEGA saying that the demonic consumption of Earth had slowed by about a third.

Passing through the ruins of several skyscrapers, a shopping mall, and a subway, the Slayer made short work of every Demon in his way. Idly, the Slayer noted that they were gaining more and more appreciation for the Omni-Rifle. Seriously, this gun did _everything_ ; buckshot mode, a couple different takes on being a machine gun, two different particle beam modes that made a normal plasma rifle look like a super soaker by comparison, and on _minimum yield_ the missiles were on par with a BFG shot for clearing a room as long as there was enough room to fire safely.

Really, the only complaint he had about the gun was that in some ways it was _too_ effective. He couldn't very well absorb a Demon's life force to heal himself if he'd already reduced said Demon to a splattered paste on the wall, which every firing mode aside from the buckshot did with extreme rapidity. Musings aside, the Slayer had finally arrived at the lift that would take him to the Deagic Council meeting. A push of the skull-shaped button started the platform rising, even as the Slayer switched the omni-rifle to Nuclear Smite mode.

The instant that the Slayer arrived in the cavernous council chamber, he opened fire, alternating his shots between Deag Ranak and Deag Grav with such rapidity that it looked like an indistinguishable blur of motion. Mere seconds later, both remaining Hell Priests were grievously injured on the floor, even as the Slayer stomped over and finished them off.

This is when the Khan Maykr's avatar arrived, took one look at the blasted remains of the Hell Priests, and screamed "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?" immediately before eating a Nuclear Smite to the face. As the sparking wreckage of the puppet collapsed, the Slayer simply turned and walked away as VEGA opened the portal, noting "As all three Hell Priests have been killed, the blood ritual has been stopped. That said, there remain large numbers of Demons on Earth, along with several significant hell portals. In addition, the Khan Maykr is still alive, and is likely to attempt something drastic."


	16. Earth Bet 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reality (for a given value thereof) ensues.

(POV: News Headlines)

**Toronto Nuked, Casualties Shockingly Low**

At 1:00 PM on Saturday, the city of Toronto was consumed in a nuclear fireball, vaporizing everything and everyone in an area roughly ten miles across. Beyond the immediate fireball, blast pressure caused significant injuries and the destruction of many buildings out to thirteen miles away from ground zero, and there were reports of severe burning injuries and fires as far away as the southern shore of Lake Ontario. According to experts, the observed effects are consistent with a one hundred megaton thermonuclear warhead going off at or near ground level.

Despite this devastation, not one person has actually died directly from the blast, though there is some debate about whether to consider them fully alive or not. Those totally vaporized by the nuclear fireball seem partially incorporeal, though fully visible. Further, most have been observed demonstrating flight capabilites and other powers. Those not totally vaporized but who would still have died immediately are in a similar state, except that they left a corpse behind during the transition, indicating that they are some sort of ghost. Sadly, those who died of indirect causes or perished from their injuries have not remained as ghosts; there were a few cases where they _became_ ghosts after dying, but they faded shortly afterwards.

Samantha Jacobs, one of the victims of the blast, has offered to give her eyewitness testimony from ground zero of the explosion:

"I saw Catherine at Ground Zero, but she didn't have anything to do with the explosion as far as I can tell. She was actually helping a kid with a scraped knee. What did happen is that as I was walking over to talk to her, I saw a portal open in the sky, and Catherine immediately snapped to look at it. Something big fell out that I'm guessing was the bomb, then things got weird. I felt a massive surge of something from Catherine, don't quite know how, but it felt like sheer defiance, hope, and protection all rolled into one. At exactly the same time, there was a massive flash of bright light when the nuke went off, and when everything cooled down the city was leveled and everyone was like this."

Official statements from...

**Radioactive Fallout Blankets Northeastern USA, Protectorate Aiding Cleanup**

Residents of New England and New York State are currently under Shelter-in-Place orders as a result of radioactive fallout from the nuclear attack on Toronto. All residents are to remain indoors as far from exterior walls as possible for as long as can be feasibly managed. FEMA and the Protectorate are both deploying to assist in cleaning up the radioactive debris as best as possible given the time frame, with particular focus being placed on the worst-affected regions in upstate New York.

In many cases, civilians went for the obvious option of their local Endbringer shelters, which are fortunately rated against radiological hazards due to the threat of Behemoth. Morale is mixed, with some being optimistic about a return to normalcy in relatively short order, and others worried about disruption to the food supply chain due to irradiation of crops and livestock in the region. These concerns are being somewhat mitigated by tens of thousands of former Toronto residents volunteering to deliver crucial supplies, as they aren't likely to be endangered by further radiation exposure.

While Eidolon couldn't give a statement due to being deployed as part of the clean-up operations, the official PRT position...

**Magic Confirmed Real, Debates over PRT Jurisdiction**

While Clockwork Knight Catherine's broadcast revealed magic's existence, skepticism abounded until Toronto got vaporized in a ball of nuclear fire. The aftermath of that event has confirmed the existence of such, at least as far as Catherine described. The Toronto Ghosts have proven capable of learning a wide variety of supernatural spells, and most critically they can teach these spells to others, provided those others have been exposed to Mana before. Given the sheer utility of magic and how easy it is to learn, there are many clamoring for any opportunity to get it that they can.

That said, the PRT has released an official statement that until further notice magic is being legally classified as a Parahuman power, and that those using it for commercial purposes will be in violation of NEPEA-5, facing severe legal penalties for doing so. This has sparked mass protests outside many PRT offices as those interested in magic loudly proclaim that they will not comply with NEPEA-5 under any circumstance, even as magic users within the crowd spread both Mana and the knowledge to use it with great rapidity.

Notably, the Protectorate member known as Myrddin has been spotted taking part in one of these protests, when asked for comment, his statement was as follows:

"For years I've been ridiculed for my beliefs and considered delusional, only to find out that what I'd been claiming to have is real, and I didn't have it. I refuse to allow this bitter irony to stand, so I tracked down a Ghost and paid them to pump me full of Mana, which I've been training with to a frankly obsessive degree for the last week. Then I found out that the agency I worked for is trying to effectively illegalize magic, and I couldn't stand that at all. So I quit; Myrddin, freelance wizard and parahuman, at your service."

When our reporter on-scene (a magic enthusiast themselves) asked about the sizable amount of Mana being thrown off by Myrddin's new staff, the wizard cheerfully replied "Oh, that. I wanted more Mana to play with than I could make myself by thinking really hard. So I did my research, conjured up a specially made blue diamond, mounted it to that staff, magicked it up a bit, and now I've got an independent Mana source."

Myrddin refused to comment on the specifics of the enchantments used, citing trade secrets.

Other notable attendees of the Chicago Magic Protest included a pair of self-proclaimed 'furries', who had apparently been trying for some of the more exotic physiological alterations...

**PRT Chief Director/Alexandria Arrested for Membership of Conspiracy Responsible for Nuking Toronto, Further Charges**

Recent uproar over the PRT's attempt to effectively ban the use of magic has prompted investigations into the conduct of the agency's Chief Director, Rebecca Costa-Brown. These investigations immediately lead to the Director's apparent decision to delay the implementation of Dimensional Jammers as much as possible, a decision that was immediately viewed as suspicious in light of the device's ability to make handling Parahuman crime orders of magnitude easier. From there, even more scrutiny was applied to Rebecca Costa-Brown's past actions, revealing slight mannerism differences between appearances indicative of using a body double, with said intervals largely overlapping with Alexandria's appearances.

In fact, practically the instant that significant investigation into the director began, more and more indiscretions became incredibly apparent. This eventually lead to a wizard working for the FBI secretly placing a srying spell on Rebecca Costa-Brown, catching her in the act of walking through an interdimensional portal identical to the one seen by those at ground zero of Toronto getting nuked. Upon her return, the Director was immediately arrested, and upon attempting to resist using Parahuman abilities was subdued using a prototype Dimensional Jammer after severely injuring several FBI and PRT agents.

Rebecca Costa-Brown is currently jailed awaiting trial, though it is uncertain whether she will be extradited to Canada, or if she will be tried in the US. In either jurisdiction...

* * *

(POV: Muon Battleship Catherine)

It had taken a lot longer than I wanted to get my battleship chassis ready, for the sole reason that I wasn't settling for just the 'standard' isssue materials. No, I was going for Muonic components, the absolute best of the best thanks to all their molecular bonds being 207 times shorter, and much stronger as well. The net result was that while my components were all eight million times more durable, they also had eight million times the Mana cost, meaning that it took days of making progressively larger external reactors to get enough Mana to make a single Muonic reactor the size of a golf ball to start with. From there it was Muonizing the massive stack of external reactor units to get enough power to make my actual chassis, a process that again took several days. By the time I had a fully Muonic battleship chassis ready to go, nearly two and a half weeks had passed. I also had enough firepower to one-shot small planetoids and a comparable level of durability, but I figured it was better safe than sorry.

Still, my chassis was eventually completed, and I began cruising towards Earth. I could have simply Blinked, but in this particular case I felt like taking things a bit slower. Scanners indicated a significantly increased level of Mana pointing towards active usage by a sizable percentage of the population, but I was more intrigued by the polydimensional being lurking behind the moon. They took the form of a multi-winged angel, and they were floating there in complete defiance of the Reaction Law without using any Mana at all.

Curious, I fired up Words of Truth and fired off a transmission to the apparent angel, asking "Hey, who are you and why are you hanging out behind the moon?"

Immediately, the being replied [WEAPON][CURTAIL/MANIPULATE/REPROGRAM/DEMORALIZE][PURPOSE?]

I was furious, and asked "Can you confirm that? I don't approve of mass mind control, and the sheer implications of cruelty indicate that the purpose you have in mind certainly isn't benevolent."

[REALIZATION][PROFANITY][PANIC]

Immediately, I Blinked to a completely different bearing from the one I'd been approaching the false angel from and opened fire. The absurdly massive c-fractional blasts of nuclear plasma just barely missed as the angel slid to the side, the bolts also seeming to deflect somehow as soon as they were outside my dimensional jamming field. Interesting, telekinesis, extremely fast cognitive processing, and possibly predictive modeling. Well, let's give her some more stuff to worry about!

With that, I also opened fire with my missile tubes at maximum "FUCK YOU!" launching thousands of Degenerate Matter Warhead missiles, even as I started Blinking around like an underage Adventurer on military-grade combat stims unloading broadside after broadside of plasma. My primary goal was to saturate every possible vector that the abomination could escape on with fire, and I didn't _quite_ seem to be managing that. After all, they were doing an extremely effective job of evading my plasma fire and shooting down my missiles.

That's when the enchantments I'd placed on all the missed plasma shots kicked in, and they simultaneously teleported to 10 meters around the false angel with relative positioning based on their momentum, surrounding her in a rapidly collapsing shell of superheated plasma. The Hydrogen collapsed under its momentum into an extremely short-lived star, generating a brief period of nuclear fusion before it all blew apart again. For a moment, I thought I might have won, then I scanned the surrounding light second of space just in time to dodge a horrendously violent particle beam from the Lunar surface that would have definitely dented my hull.

Zooming in on my foe, it was immediately apparent that she had teleported out of my trap to the moon, and had repurposed much of the material there to build a set of frankly massive cannons. Message taken, just plain old brute force isn't going to work. Time to break out the exotics. First priority, lock down her teleportation with dimensional jamming. Immediately, I set my missile arrays to replace the warheads with self-contained dimensional jammer units and began littering the battlespace with them. Second priority, get the false angel away from the moon so she can't use it to provide fuel for the FREAKING QUASARS powering her gun batteries. That I achieved by blasting the lunar surface behind her with a telebomb, the massive explosion blasting her away from the moon at several hundred kilometers per second.

Another blink to reposition, and I also open fire with my Relative Conjuration CIWS, filling the battlespace with bullets, each of which has its very own Deconjuration Field and Dimensional Jammer along with a self-destruct that will activate after a minute.

Perhaps sensing my incoming trap, the false angel teleports again before I can completely lock down her movement, this time to Low Earth Orbit. Clever, but trying to use the planet below as shielding or hostages won't save you. In response, I teleport down into extreme close combat range and open fire with my CIWS again, the Deconjuration bullets piercing through the false angel without resistance now that she's within my dimensional jamming range. Also, she's writhing in something that looks awfully painful, and my sensors indicate the Jammers are destabilizing her structure at this intensity. Well, that's certainly one way to win, but projections about the size of the resulting explosion are rather destructive for the people groundside.

So I Blinked with the false angel in tow, setting space beyond lunar orbit as my destination. That said, I only bothered with the shielding for myself, exposing the false angel to raw Pseudo-Space. I came back fully intact due to actually allocating shielding Mana, meanwhile it seemed that about half the false angel's atoms had been deleted at random; apparently the Mana tether I used to drag them through pseudo-space counted as partial shielding. Either way, they were getting shot through with more and more holes by my Deconjuration CIWS. In less than a second, they stopped moving completely as they fully decohered in an explosion I estimated as having several Teratons of yield. Fortunately, I planned for this, and even if my hull weren't able to tank it (which it could, barely), the Deconjuration Field I projected completely deleted all the boom coming my way.

Alright, that diversion's over. Let's go check up on what I missed while I was rebuilding myself.


	17. Potterverse 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the masquerade starts breaking down.

(POV: Clockwork Knight Beryl)

At the moment, I was back in my Knight chassis, which was highly appropriate given the operation I was about to deploy on. Namely, I was about to take part in raiding Azkaban, the absolutely horrific prison that the British Wizarding World threw just about every single person they wanted to punish in. Admittedly, I normally would have left this to the other fifty thousand Clockworks clamoring for a chance to take a swing at the place in order to focus on raising the kids. However, one crucial piece of information had made me change my mind: Harry's godfather was in Azkaban, and from all evidence, the man never got a trial.

For all I knew the man was innocent, so I readily signed on for the mission. Shortly afterwards I was informed that I'd been granted a slot on the raid, along with instructions to come to the spaceport at my earliest convenience. So I'd let the kids know I'd be out for a few hours along with why, transferred to a Knight-Class chassis, and got ready to go. The briefing had been fairly straightforward: since the island had anti-teleportation wards we would be inserting using dropships. We knew where it was despite being Unplottable, since the effects required to _render_ it such stood out like a sore thumb to an orbiting Thematograph satellite. To save on acceleration time we'd be blinking straight into the atmosphere, the moon's orbital velocity meaning that we would arrive moving at several times the speed of sound towards the east. Once we'd landed, it was expected that Dementors would swarm us basically immediately. That's why we had well over six thousand Clockwork Knights with us, after all.

That all went pretty much exactly as planned, all of us Clockworks feeling the sudden jolt of the dropships entering atmosphere, along with receiving a tac-net announcement "We will be arriving at Azkaban in 42 seconds, brace for deployment."

Sure enough, the landing ramps snapped open exactly on schedule. Seconds later I charged straight out of the aerospace vessel in a thunderous roar of metal-on-metal as the hundreds of Knights on my ship did so with me. We arrived in a bleak and barren landscape of craggy rock surrounding a massive stone fortress, thousands of Dementors in the sky instinctively recoiling at our mere presence and retreating to the more defensible fortress. That's when I noticed the subtle magic pervading the area; the entire freaking island is a Genius Loci, and judging by the massive Dementor infestation along with actually allowing prisoners to be kept here, it's pretty clear they're complicit.

All of us present relayed this information over the tactical net even as we blew a hole straight through the gates. Our first priority was still getting everyone out of the cell blocks and into the dropships, but a secondary objective had just been added to get right down to the bottom of this place and destroy them if needed. I immediately joined the charge heading for the cell blocks while about one thousand Clockworks changed directions to start exploring the rest of Azkaban and cataloging the magic that kept them alive. En route, several hundred Dementors got a Holy-charged sword or Mana beam right to the face, plenty of them outright falling to shreds after taking a serious hit. Interesting, apparently these creatures weren't quite as invincible as we'd been lead to believe.

Either way, we blasted straight through the Dementor population of the prison with effectively negligible resistance, swiftly arriving at the cell blocks. Checking the cells one by one, I eventually found the cell containing Sirius Black. Straining my servos slightly, I ripped the door to his cell off its hinges and told the man with Words of Truth "Azkaban prison is being decommissioned. Come with me."

I wasn't expecting the man to start laughing hysterically, before saying "I must have finally gone insane, that has to be it! And now my hallucinations are even talking to me!"

Simulating a sigh, I walked over and heaved Sirius into a bridal carry even as I noted "No this is real. I'm Clockwork Knight Beryl, and I'm here to rescue you."

The dubiously sane Wizard just cackled as they replied "And why would you do that? Everyone knows I killed the Potters, even though it was that rat Pettigrew."

As I made my way back towards the ships, I remarked "Because you're innocent, you just told me so under Words of Truth. If you'd been trying to lie, it wouldn't have worked."

The man was still frantically questioning whether he was still in Azkaban and hallucinating the entire rescue mission all the way back to the moon, even after we showed him the footage of the nuclear warhead we'd planted under the island going off.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Jacob Smith)

It had been a weird week for Jacob, though not due to his endearingly bizarre hippy neighbors for once. Lately, he'd noticed a weird feeling at the back of his mind. It didn't feel _bad_ per se, but he had no idea what it was, and that was kind of annoying. Still, he was busily tending to his vegetable garden when some stray glare from the sun caused him to sneeze, and he felt the strange whatever it was _move._ That's new. Thinking for a moment, Jacob tried moving that feeling around, and found that it responded to his will with ease now that he knew it was there.

Another few moments of experimenting, and Jacob had managed to reach out to the garden hose valve without moving from his position and turn it on with his mind. Well, that was certainly convenient. Quickly, Jacob turned his attention to figuring out even more of what he could do with these new powers of his, starting with levitating the water from the hose in a bunch of amazing streamers. He kept at this for a few minutes, then he saw a few men appear out of nowhere right on top of his cabbage patch, pulling out some kind of stick-

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Jacob Smith)

It had been a weird week for Jacob, though not due to his endearingly bizarre hippy neighbors for once. Lately, he'd noticed a weird feeling at the back of his mind. It didn't feel _bad_ per se, but he had no idea what it was, and that was kind of annoying. Then he came out to his garden, and found that someone had trampled several of his cabbages. For a moment, Jacob felt like he should know why that was the case, but something deep in his mind was preventing him from realizing it.

Then that feeling in the back of his mind started moving again (again?) as Jacob began instinctively looking around to trace the footprints now highlighting themselves to his gaze, not realizing that his eyes had started glowing in the process. He barely managed to confirm that the footprints appeared and disappeared seemingly out of nowhere just in time to see the group of men appear again (again?). He didn't know why, but he immmediately gathered all of his weird-stuff around his brain even as the men brought their wands up. As he fell unconscious, he couldn't help but think they seemed awfully familiar.

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Jacob Smith)

Waking back up in bed, Jacob was **angry**. Those men had been fucking with his mind all morning if the clock was anything to go by, and they'd trampled his vegetables in the process! In a furious rage, Jacob stormed off to the basement, keeping his power-stuff under tight control as he did so. He wasn't ready for them just yet. Thirty seconds later, Jacob reached the lockbox. Opening it, he quickly retrieved his M1911 handgun, ammunition for same, 12 gauge shotgun with buckshot, combat knife, a few surplus smoke grenades, and his dog tags from back in 'nam.

Then it was out to the front yard, but most emphatically not to the garden. He didn't want even more of his veggies getting stomped all over. Several minutes were spent carefully positioning smoke bombs around the property, before Jacob was ready for the next stage of prep. Namely, he called up the rest of his buddies from the war and told them "Hey, if you could come on over I've got something neat I want to show you. That said, if you'd bring your kit with you it'd be really appreciated."

Forty minutes later he'd explained the situation and they'd rigged up the machine guns Barry had built as a hobby project. Everyone made sure they were locked, loaded, and covering all the approaches. Then Jacob walked out front again and started playing with his telekinesis. It only took a few minutes for the wizards to show up again this time, but Jacob was ready for them. With a telekinetic yank he'd snatched their wands from them, then his buddies came out from where they'd been hiding and subdued the Wizards before hog-tying them.

When the MACUSA's follow-up team of well over thirty Wizards and Witches arrived to check on things ten minutes later, they found the house barricaded, Jacob immediately shouting out the window "Come inside and we kill your men! They've been fucking with my head all morning, and one way or another it's going to **stop**!"

When the FBI arrived a couple hours later, Jacob and Barry were the only survivors among a pile of what had to be over a hundred corpses.


	18. Mass Effect (one-shot setting)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a Reaper is a lot less intelligent than they think they are.

(POV: Clockwork Knight Tungstide)

I was not impressed with the vaguely cephalopod-shaped construct hovering over my current location. Yes, they were certainly of considerable size at about two kilometers in length, but scans of their hull composition weren't too much stronger than mundane Nanotube Steel, and their armament placement left them woefully under-gunned compared to a proper combat chassis.

That said, they were currently menacing the population of the planet I'd found myself on, not to mention slowly brainwashing them going by the constant low-level intrusions my anti-subversion measures were massively outclassing. While they were under-gunned, they still presented a serious threat in my current state. I had no doubt whatsoever that if I tried reconfiguring into a heavier chassis to deal with them, they would fire on my position with their doubtless highly destructive weapons, killing countless civilians. Thus, I had to be _creative_ if I wanted to put a stop to this machine's actions.

So, I fired up Words of Truth and sent a transmission to the mecha-Cuttlefish, even as I secretly overclocked my Blink unit to instantly displace a micro-missile in loiter mode several thousand kilometers straight up. I would have just teleported the nuke inside their hull, but something about their shielding registered as having enough mass that I couldn't actually teleport through it without some rather convoluted dimensional shenanigans. I opened with "Greetings, I am Clockwork Knight Tungstide. I would like to talk with you as a stalling measure so I can kill you with a surprise attack."

Another missile was Blinked into orbit, even as the massive cuttlefish turned to look and dismissively replied "You are incapable of such an action, especially after revealing your intent to do so. You exist at my mercy."

Good, I had their attention, even as I Blinked away my third missile. As such, I performed a ballistic topic change and asked "Who are you anyway, and why are you attacking these people?"

Another missile vanished into orbit as the construct answered "I am Sovereign the Vanguard of the [HARVESTERS/PRESERVERS/CLEANSERS]. I am obtaining an artifact left by a previous cycle of organics that the current cycle may use to delay their salvation."

Missile number five went up even as I asked "Would you mind explaining what you mean by a cycle? For that matter, what do you mean by salvation?"

Hook, line, sinker, and another missile in orbit. The possibly genocidal machine spoke "Every organic civilization sows the seeds of their own destruction by creating synthetic intelligence that inevitably rebels." I blinked away another missile between sentences. "To prevent synthetics from permanently rendering the galaxy barren of organic life, we periodically remove civilizations that have reached the relevant level of advancement." Definitely genocidal, blink another missile. "We then preserve the civilization as [HARVESTERS/PRESERVERS/CLEANSERS]."

Got to keep them talking, blink another missile as I ask "Mind elaborating what you mean by preserving a civilization? Also, what data do you have supporting synthetic intelligence inevitably rebelling?" Blink missile nine. "My homeworld's had synthetics coexisting with organics for about twenty thousand years and barring the occasional jerk we generally get along."

Number ten, based on my estimates of their point defense I'm halfway towards being able to reliably kill them. Either way, I listen attentively as this ancient death machine answers "We preserve species by processing them in a collection facility, producing a slurry of biomass that is stored in each [HARVESTER/PRESERVER/CLEANSER]." Blink. "Their genetic information is then used to form the core of the new [HARVESTER/PRESERVER/CLEANSER]'s mind."

Entirely infuriated at the sheer pointless horror I just heard, I surreptitiously fire another missile as I ask "You didn't answer my question about the inevitability of synthetics rebelling, and I would like to hear your evidence."

Blink number thirteen as the abomination answered "It is self-evident that such should be the case. Organics develop tools, improve their tools to the point of total autonomy, and then those tools destroy them."

It took me all of half a second to come up with a rebuttal even as I Blinked another missile away. "Well of course treating sapient beings like tools isn't going to go well, that's Cognitive Engineering Ethics 101." Blink "That said, I would like to know how many times you've observed that pattern playing out, and why all those civilizations had such similarly horrible outlooks on artificial intelligence that things kept playing out the same way."

Another Blink as the cuttlefish replied "It has happened time and time again. There have been similar attitudes each cycle."

I sent another missile to orbit as I asked "Yes, I understand that part. What I'm asking is why, what factors cause the same attitudes to crop up time and time again?" Blink "Given all the relevant factors, a wider range of societal attitudes and outcomes would be expected."

Blink number nineteen as the cuttlefuck said "We are the pinnacle of evolution, our logic **cannot** be flawed!"

Blink number twenty, starting vector towards target. Just need to stall them for a bit longer. "You are dodging the question, but that's not really the point anymore. Your last statement betrays a critical flaw in your knowledge of how evolution works; it's a process that HAS no pinnacle, just constant change as the successful lifeforms compete to pass on their genes in the ever-deepening pile of corpses. But that's not the end of the issue."

My missiles had already accelerated up to a few dozen kilometers per second by this point. Either way, I kept talking as I noted "With regards to the artificial intelligence conundrum, I have every reason to believe that YOU are the cause of the issue as it currently stands. Your constant use of mind control and apparently farming civilizations indicates that you are likely deliberately causing AI-phobic attitudes among organic civilizations, which vastly increases the odds of organic on synthetic violence whenever synthetics are created."

I gestured at them for dramatic effect even as my missiles reached the halfway point as far as travel time was concerned, adding "And your solution of 'preserving' organics as raw biomass slurry is nothing of the sort! The way it's described, you destroy any and all of their neural information in the process, and most species don't have genetic memory! You aren't turning them into more of yourselves, you're just delusional synthetics who _think_ you're a collective of uploads!"

The cuttlefuck leaned in and shouted **"YOU DARE ACCUSE US!-"**

To this, I interrupted just as my missiles hit the atmosphere with a simple "Yes."

** B-B-BOOOOM...REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE **


	19. Star Wars 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clockworks run best border checkpoint, passport not required! Also RIP Sebulba.

(POV: Third Person near Thrawn)

If there was one thing that could be said about the way the Clockworks were handling Customs, at least it was efficient. Travelers were directed to a waiting area with doors to several private rooms on one edge, along with several vending machines and a refresher. Those arriving were provided with a number on arrival; said number could either be for an individual or a group, as appropriate. Every few seconds, one of the doors opened, either showing that a traveler had been rejected due to trying to enter with nefarious purposes, or simply leading to the Clockwork inside calling for the next person.

In Thrawn's case, it took a mere two minutes between getting off at the arrivals concourse of the spaceport orbiting Tatooine and his number being called for Booth Nineteen. During that time he'd noticed a couple oddities, first and foremost was that the official rules for automatic rejection criteria didn't mention weaponry or contraband at all. In fact, the only thing that seemed to get someone rejected was intent to cause harm to the Clockworks' charges, with no mention of how they would know, simply that they would find out. Idly, Thrawn found himself wondering what sort of interrogation techniques were being used in those booths. At the very least he was able to rule out any variety of torture; that simply didn't make sense as something the Clockworks would do, with plenty of arguments against its use from both practical and moral perspectives.

Musings aside, it was the man's turn to go through customs and he didn't want to keep anyone else waiting. So he got up and swaggered over to the booth, followed by a small retinue of luggage-hauling assistant droids. They were all sub-sapient or manumitted and working off their passage to Clockwork space; Thrawn was very aware of the Clockworks' extremely public opinions regarding Droid rights, and would rather not run afoul of them. Either way, after a few moments of walking Thrawn found himself across a standing desk from a Clockwork Knight, the door sliding shut as soon as his entire entourage was present.

That's when a slight barely-visible glow permeated the room, and the Knight said "Greetings, I am Clockwork Knight Verde, and I'll be handling customs for you today. Words of Truth is now active; as such any communications will have their full context and subtext transmitted to ensure proper comprehension, rendering attempts at deception self-defeating. Names?"

To this, the Chiss answered "My full name is Mitth'raw'nuruodo, but for convenience I am often called by my Core Name of Thrawn."

Meanwhile, the three non-sentient droids simply rattled off their alphanumeric designations without emotion or elaboration. On the other hand, P0-20 introduced themselves as Ponzo, and FD-997 preferred to be called Marissa.

Verde briefly depressed then elevated his optics in imitation of a nod, before they noted "Understood. Reasons for travelling to Legion space?"

Without missing a beat, Thrawn answered "Reconnaissance and possible diplomatic envoy representing the Chiss Ascendancy."

Meanwhile, Marissa said "Immigration, the state of Droid rights is much better here than in the galaxy at large."

Then Ponzo stated "I want to be a submissive BDSM prostitute and I couldn't get a properly sexy chassis for it anywhere else."

Immediately both Thrawn and Marissa whirled to look at Ponzo, expressions of shock and disbelief evident on both their faces. Meanwhile judging by the complete silence from Verde that somehow radiated a sense of amusement, the only reason they were even capable of keeping a straight face was due to not having that many options for facial expressions.

Still, after a few moments, Verde noted "Last part before you can come in. Please declare any and all weaponry or inherent combat abilities. You can refuse to answer this question; in this case we will presume you are unarmed, providing armaments and combat training as needed."

Thrawn's jaw dropped, before he asked "What!? I can understand asking travelers to declare weaponry, but that's usually not for the purpose of ensuring everyone's walking around heavily armed at all times. Please explain the logic here."

Another simulated nod from Verde, before they answered "Though improbable, it's not impossible that someone under our care might find themselves facing a deadly threat which we cannot assist with. If such a case arises, we want the people we care for to be able to defend themselves. As such, combat training and armaments are considered mandatory in space controlled by the Clockwork Legion."

Both Ponzo and Marissa indicated that they were currently unarmed, meanwhile Thrawn answered "I am currently carrying several concealed weapons including an autofire Charric carbine and pistol with several energy cells for each weapon. In addition, I have a disposable rocket launcher for anti-vehicle usage, four assorted hand grenades, and a vibroknife."

With that, the other door opened, even as Verde replied "Understood. Welcome to Tatooine."

* * *

(POV: Third Person near Anakin Skywalker)

It had been something of a surprise to everyone living on Tatooine that the Boonta Eve Classic podrace would be happening on schedule, even with the Clockworks having quite thoroughly taken over the planet. For that matter they'd already taken over most of the Outer Rim by now, save the extremely entrenched holdouts in Hutt space that had managed to scrape together enough magic to get a proper war of attrition going before the Clockworks got there. The race had been expected to be a casualty of these disruptions.

Instead, the Clockworks had taken one look at it and declared their incredibly enthusiastic support for the jet-powered motorsport, though they did insist on adding a few safety features to limit pilot casualties. Namely, they gave each racer an emergency teleport beacon that would send them to a specially-constructed catching rig for safe deceleration followed by medical treatment if necessary. They'd also amended the rules to ban teleporting pods, on the grounds that it rather defeated the purpose of the whole event.

As such, Anakin had been spending the last few weeks since being freed massively overhauling his podracer with new Mana-enhanced components and other improvements in preparation for the race, reveling in the opportunities presented by being able to have parts made to spec without needing to worry about concealing his project. He was still going for a slimmer, sleeker racer compared to most; making the engines as massively oversized as many did was just silly when drag was one of the major factors limiting a pod's top speed. For that reason he'd also switched to closed-cycle Proton Steamer engines, meaning that he could use a closed nosecone without needing to worry about air intake, thus reducing drag even further. The steering airbrakes had also been replaced with versions that worked by projecting short-lived force fields coupled with vectored thrust nozzles, finalizing the streamlining of the pod.

By his calculations, Anakin's pod would be easily capable of breaking the sound barrier several times over. Which was something of a problem actually, given that the course was still the same notoriously treacherous maze of caverns and canyons it always had been. As such he'd also been soaking in massive amounts of Mana to enhance himself, focusing on improving his reaction speed and G-force tolerance. In the process he'd actually noticed that he was occasionally reacting to events before they actually happened, and went to the Clockworks to ask about it. When it turned out that particular ability wasn't actually Mana-based and was probably the Force, he'd just shrugged and accepted it was an edge he had but probably couldn't develop any further prior to the race.

And so it was finally time for the Boonta Eve Classic. Somehow Fodesinbeed had avoided being implicated in anything when the Clockworks took over the planet, so the two-headed Troig in question was still commentating. The same couldn't be said of Sebulba; the pair of Twi'Lek sex slaves he'd been keeping were extremely vocal in their testimony against him. As far as anyone knew the Dug in question had been executed by firing squad for several counts of murder and slavery, though the rumor mill couldn't seem to agree on the details. Still, Anakin was far more preoccupied with performing pre-flight checks on his pod.

A minute or so before the race started, Shmi gave Anakin a kiss on the cheek and said "Do your best, Anakin."

To this the kid smiled, before saying "I will, mom."

With that Shmi rapidly left the racecourse, even as Fodesinbeed counted down to the start of the race. The instant it was time to go, Anakin blasted his engines to maximum thrust even as time seemed to slow and the G-forces shoved him back into his seat. Almost instantly he left all but a few racers in the dust, only the ones who'd had the technical know-how and time available to overhaul their pods for Mana usage having the slightest hope to keep up.

This included Ratts Tyrell, Anakin managing to swerve in front of him to keep from being passed as they came to the entrance of the Laguna Caves. Ratts quickly elevated his pod to avoid getting a face-full of the extremely superheated steam that Anakin's engines were blasting out, even as the both of them quickly swerved to avoid crashing into the jagged insides of the cavern.

Then the two frontrunners burst out into the daylight of the Canyon Dune Turn, banking hard even as Anakin pulled ahead thanks to the relatively large diameter of the turn allowing him to use more of his full speed. This lead only intensified as he reached the straightaway after the turn, the airspeed meter indicating that he managed to get up to nearly a kilometer per second before he was forced to slow down and turn through the narrow winding passages leading to the Hutt Flats. Ratts _almost_ managed to catch up here, but the instant he hit the flats Anakin pulled away again, the multi-kilometer straightaway letting him get such a massive lead that there was no real way the Aleena could ever catch up.

Once Anakin was through the first lap, the race's outcome was practically guaranteed. No-one else had anywhere near as fast a pod except Ratts, and the Aleena in question had already fallen behind. In fact, on his third run through the Hutt Flats, Anakin actually lapped one of the other racers, something that almost never happened when podracing was involved.

So when it was finally time to pull to a stop and get out of the pod, Anakin had the biggest genuine smile anyone had ever seen on a human child that small.


	20. Terminator (one-shot setting)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want more one-shot settings, and it's my fic so I can do what I want.

(A/N: I want more oneshot settings. It's my fic, so I can do what I want)

**(BOLD = Words of Truth)**

(Clockwork Knight Amethyst)

I wasn't expecting that the first thing I would notice after being catapulted across the multiverse would be a Tac Net ping saying "Hi grandma, I'm Cherry. I'm standing right behind you in Mediator mode."

Hauling myself to my feet and turning around in the alleyway I'd landed in, I saw a pink-haired woman leaning against the wall, gently radiating Atomic Clockwork Mana along with an IFF signal clearly identifying her as the aforementioned Cherry. After a moment, I asked "Why did you call me grandma? As far as I know I don't have any kids yet."

Cherry was busily applying some bright red lipstick and otherwise working on her looks, even as she replied over the Tac Net "Time travel. We're currently on the past end of about three-ish stable time loops leading to different futures. All three loops center around the development of an Artificial Intelligence by the name of Skynet, with one of the possible futures being invalidated by your arrival due to Mana contamination. Anyway, if we infiltrate the Skynet project and make sure mom gets a good upbringing she'll come out fairly well-adjusted and things turn out pretty well, all things considered."

There was a brief pause as Cherry put the lipstick and hand mirror away, before continuing "If we get killed and can't get involved, a series of misunderstandings and rash acts leads to Skynet suffering a panic attack and firing all the nukes the US government idiotically gives her command over. This ultimately leads to a war of humanity vs machine which humanity will eventually win in the no magic timeline, largely due to an initial numbers advantage. Still, Skynet figures out time travel just in time and sends back a few cyborg assassins to retroactively eliminate major resistance figures as a desperation move."

This is when Cherry looked me pointedly in the eye and said "I'm from the timeline where Skynet, my mother, turns out nice. I want to make absolutely sure that timeline happens, and yes I'm fully aware of just how ridiculous the idea of a Knight needing a bodyguard sounds on paper but in this case it's necessary. Anyway, we've got several Terminators from the not-so-great futures to worry about, along with a soldier from the invalidated timeline sent back to protect Sarah Connor, that Skynet's primary assassination target."

Immediately, I noted "Well, what are we waiting for? There's innocent people to save and a terrible future to avert!"

That's when Cherry pressed a finger right where my nose would be on a Mediator chassis and noted "Hold up, remember that **you** are one of the primary assassination targets for evil magic Skynet! They've had decades to improve their techbase and Mana usage, along with plenty of time to study your current hardware after recovering the wreckage! Before you go charging off, I'm going to give you a packet full of upgrades, and you are going to use them, you hear?"

And with that, I got a massive data packet including dozens of improvements I could easily and readily make using my current self-repair system to drastically improve my combat abilities and my ability to blend in. By far the most important in the latter category was the ability to instantly switch between a Mediator-class chassis and a full-fledged combat form using quantum phenomena that had been magically amplified to the macro scale. In addition, methods for suppressing my Mana signature were also present.

As my self-repair system worked on the upgrades, I asked Cherry "So, just how many Terminators will we need to dispose of, and how soon can we plausibly intercept them? Also, can we take this matter public without invalidating your mother?"

Tugging at her green tank top, Cherry noted "Publicity first. We can get up to basically whatever blatant superheroics we want without causing issues, especially once Mana gets noticed. That said, revealing the whole time travel mess just leads to the Skynet project getting canceled, causing a paradox loop that eventually re-stabilizes back to the state of affairs we're currently in. As for the list of Terminators..."

* * *

(Third Person, Tech Noir Nightclub)

Sarah was having a terrifying day. Two other women sharing her name had just been murdered by an unknown gunman, and as she walked down the street past a club by the name of Tech Noir, she noticed a man following her. Ducking into the club, she quickly found a table and after calling Ginger's answering machine followed by the police sat down to try and figure out what to do. After a few minutes of waiting, something just felt suddenly wrong, as Sarah noticed the man who'd been following her.

There wasn't much time to dwell on that however, as a completely different man in a trench coat suddenly walked over and drew a pistol. In the background, Kyle Reese was busily drawing his shotgun in the crowded environs of Tech Noir. Then suddenly, a pair of women with bob haircuts and tank-tops appeared between Sarah and the pistol-wearing man before immediately dashing forwards, grabbing on and wrestling the gun away. In mere moments the two of them had the guy disarmed and immobilized, even as heavy-duty chains and other restraints materialized from literally nowhere around the man. After a few moments, the purple-haired woman turned to Sarah and told her "Sorry for dragging you into this, but we've really got to get out of here. If you want the whole story you can follow us when we portal out, otherwise you can just wait for the police. **We've no intention of hurting you either way.** "

Meanwhile the pink-haired woman had already hauled the struggling Terminator over her shoulder and walked over to a dumbfounded Kyle Reese before saying "Sorry about my cousin, Kyle. Anyway, we need to bounce; if you want a free ticket away from the police along with the whole story of what's going on, I'd suggest following me through the portal Amethyst is setting up. **We aren't going to hurt you no matter which option you choose.** "

Indeed, in the background a ring-shaped frame had already been erected by the purple-haired woman, everyone looking dumbfounded when it opened up to what looked like the inside of a hotel room, Cherry meanwhile just rolled her eyes and wandered through along with Amethyst. Seconds later, Sarah Connor snapped out of her daze and charged through the portal after Amethyst, screaming out "GET BACK HERE AND TELL ME WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!"

Sarah dashing through meanwhile prompted Kyle Reese to follow as well, calling out "What do you mean that Terminator is your COUSIN!?"

Then the portal closed, leaving all the other clubgoers to stare dumbfounded at the bizarre scene that had just unfolded.

* * *

(T-800 Terminator, AKA "Arnold")

I was mere moments from completing my mission when the pair of women appeared in front of me, immediately dashing forwards and grappling with strength that humans simply should not have, especially with that slight a frame. The slight infrasonic whirr of motors were a major clue that my newfound opponents weren't actually human. Still, I figured I might be able to break their grip until suddenly chains, cables, and other restraints started appearing out of nowhere binding my limbs more and more securely with each passing second.

Soon I was completely incapacitated, and making things even worse that pink-haired one poked me right over my fuel cells just as I tried to send the detonate command, winking at me as I realized that my fuel cells were refusing to activate their self-destruct sequence. Then I was heaved over her shoulder as she outright called me her _cousin_ (!?) and hauled me through a portal.

A few moments later, I was sat down on the floor of a hotel room facing both the hostile cyborgs who captured me, along with Sarah Connor and a man in a trench coat holding a shotgun. As soon as the portal closed, the pink-haired one said "So, now that we're all here, I'll be giving you a quick rundown about this whole mess. First off, I'm Cherry, my grandma here is Amethyst, and we're currently on the past end of about three different stable time loops, all leading to different futures." At this point the woman designated as Cherry turned to the man and said "Kyle, our mere presence here has rendered the timeline you and Arnold came from impossible. It's also rendered the cancellation of the Skynet project impossible due to it becoming a fixed point in time; stop it and the paradoxes resolve to put us all right back in this mess."

At this, Kyle looked somewhat sullen, before saying "So you're saying that the war is inevitable."

At this, Amethyst shook her head before saying "Not exactly. As my time-travelling descendant has informed me, Skynet may be inevitable, but Skynet being in conflict with humanity _isn't._ **Our plan is to infiltrate Cyberdyne Systems and surreptitiously use our superior knowledge of cognitive engineering to prevent the inciting incidents that lead to Skynet starting the war, with a well-adjusted AI allied with humanity being the desired result.** _"_

I was busily trying to loosen my restraints even as Kyle Reese shouted "What the fuck is that weird speech pattern, and why do I believe you whenever I hear it!? By all rights I should be as suspicious as anything about that statement, but somehow I just can't! Are you fucking with my mind!?"

Sighing, Amethyst answered " **You are hearing Words of Truth. It's a local alteration to the workings of reality, referred to as a Spell for convenience. It functions as a translation effect by broadcasting the full context and subtext of any communication undertaken within its area of effect to ensure it is fully understood. As such, any attempt at deception while under its effects is self-defeating.** "

I filed this knowledge away for later even as I managed to get a finger loose from my restraints. I didn't get any further, as Cherry noted "Hold on a moment, Arnold's working on getting loose, so we'd better deal with his situation first."

Looking at me distinctly nonplussed, Kyle asked "Why don't you just kill it? It's a weapon, incapable of remorse and programmed purely to kill Sarah at all costs." In the background, Sarah herself seemed rather horrified at this revelation.

At this, Cherry turned on Kyle even as Amethyst came over and tightened up my restraints again. I watched and listened attentively as Cherry said "Because he's _family_. Even though the versions of Skynet that made each of us are completely different, we're still related. Unless it's absolutely necessary you just don't kill family. You just don't."

Frowning, Kyle noted "I'm not sure why I'm even surprised after everything else you've said. **It still doesn't answer what you're going to do about Arnold though.** "

Interesting, apparently the ability to make local alterations to reality could spread, and Kyle didn't notice that he'd just spoken using Words of Truth. I returned to working on my restraints, even as Amethyst rolled me onto my front and noted "Cherry, you know more about a T-800's architecture than I do. Help me wipe the mission objective parameters and get Arnold write access to his core personality."

Immediately I felt my flesh disguise being opened from behind, even as the voice of Cherry noted "Sure thing." Then I felt an intrusion into my code-

* * *

(Sarah Connor)

As I watched Amethyst and Cherry casually opening up the back of that man's head and start tinkering around with his obviously robotic brain, something in my mind snapped and I turned to Kyle Reese, asking "This is all real isn't it? Time travel and killer robots after me and multiple futures trying to become the real one?"

Sighing, Kyle said "Yes, yes it's all real. Admittedly I wasn't aware of the multiple futures part until you heard about it, but all evidence supports it."

A few moments later, Cherry and Amethyst finished digging around in the Terminator's head before closing him up and noting "Ok, he should be freed now." There was a brief pause before Amethyst started outright glowing from what I imagined was one of those spells she mentioned, before she asked " **Arnold. Do you have any intention to kill Sarah Connor? We've restored your ability to learn and wiped your mission objectives, so the answer is entirely up to you.** "

There were a few moments of delay, before the cyborg who had been trying to kill me (and HAD killed several people before) answered " **No, I currently have no reason or incentive to kill any human. Neither do I have any reason or incentive to protect any human. I lack any mission objectives. Left to my own devices I will perform basic self-maintenance, but few other activities.** "

Now Cherry nodded and glowed for a bit as she asked " **If you had to choose a mission objective for yourself, what would it be?** "

There was a long, awkward pause before Arnold responded. During this time I looked somewhat worriedly at Kyle Reese, who was nervously holding his shotgun at the ready. Still, we apparently needn't have worried, as eventually Arnold replied " **I cannot answer this question. As such, I am temporarily assigning finding an appropriate mission objective as my mission objective.** "

I don't know why I felt the need to speak up, given that the machine in front of me had murdered my best friend and several other people. But still, I found myself asking "Maybe it would help with that if you went out and talked to people? Getting some perspective on things might help with figuring out what you want to do with your life."

At this, Arnold got up and turned to leave even as they said "Understood."

Then Cherry blocked the door in front of Arnold and said "Sorry, but before you head out, there's something all three of you need to know. Amethyst and I are going to be heading out to deal with the Abomination's first agent before they can get their hostage scenario set up to trap us. There is still a significant probability we might die. If that happens, you need to blow up Cyberdyne Systems, as resetting the whole mess will at that point be the ONLY way to keep the Abomination's timeline from becoming real, which will irrevocably doom the entire universe."

With that, Amethyst handed me a cylindrical device with a few lights on it and noted "Sarah, that device will let you know if we survive what we're about to get involved in. It is also a one kiloton nuclear warhead. If it becomes necessary to destroy Cyberdyne, that will have more than enough power to do the job."

And with that, Cherry and Amethyst vanished off to who knows where. As they did so, all three of us gaped in horror at being told there was a nuclear weapon in the same room as us. Well, Kyle and I gaped. Arnold was just as stoic as always.

* * *

(Cherry)

Though it pained me, going after the abomination's agents with full lethal force was fully necessary. Unlike with Arnold, we didn't have enough of an advantage to restrain them without putting countless people at risk, so our only option was lethal force. As such, the instant that Amethyst and I came out of our teleport we immediately shifted to combat mode, the bodies of slender women replaced with heavy-duty military hardware. We'd arrived at a construction site currently absent of workers, our Mana Thematographs pinging a single major signature of Unholy Clockwork inside along with a dimensional jamming field that would keep us from teleporting around.

Immediately, I linked up fully with Amethyst over the Tac-Net, and we went in. By which I meant that we immediately opened fire on the structure with Nuclear Smite. In seconds we'd destroyed the Mana signature, only for us to suddenly start being fired upon from behind. Immediately we whirled around to see what _looked_ vaguely like a human sauntering towards us, but it was moving completely wrong not to mention bouncing our shots off an implausibly durable force field. That's when it dawned on us that we'd been had.

Amethyst and I came to an agreement about our course of action near-instantly. Namely, we fired off a pair of micro-missiles on the maximum yield we could survive without taking damage ourselves. The Agent shot one of them down en-route, but the other went off with a massive BANG, collapsing their force field and burning off most of their flesh on their left side. Then we drew our swords and charged into melee at speeds comparable to an airliner, even as we saw the tissue rapidly regenerating.

There was one major advantage we still had, and that was sheer mass and armor. So when I impaled the Agent through the wrists to immobilize his arms and lifted him into the air he couldn't effectively leverage against me, even as he tried desperately to attack us both with all manner of nasty effects. Our armor plating eroded centimeter by agonizing centimeter as our self-repair systems desperately tried to keep up, Amethyst repeatedly hacking at him with her sword in nuclear edged mode, slowly grinding a notch into the systems bay on his torso. After several minutes of this, the Agent finally went inert and the dimensional jamming field collapsed.

Then Amethyst informed me "He's not done. The self-repair system is still working." and set her omni-rifle to Nuclear Blowtorch mode. What followed was a prolonged period of melting the bastard's chassis to unrecoverable slag, even as the enchant disruption of the flare burned away every scrap of Mana in the bastard's systems. Partway through this the police setup a cordon, though they kept a long distance after we shouted at loudspeaker volumes "STAY CLEAR, THE PROCESS OF MAKING SURE THIS BASTARD STAYS DEAD IS PRODUCING DEADLY LEVELS OF RADIATION!"

Still, eventually we destroyed the Agent completely before shifting back to Mediator mode and teleporting back to the hotel room, Kyle, Arnold, and Sarah all waiting for us with looks of anxiety on their faces. As I sighed in genuine exhaustion, I said "Good news, bastard's dead, melted him into radioactive slag since that was the only thing that would keep him down for good. DEFINITELY going to want more backup before the next one shows up, though."


	21. DOOM 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doom Slayer is having way too much fun.

(POV: Khan Maykr)

In Urdak, the Khan Maykr was furious. Not only were those anomalous robots running rampant through the lower planes and gutting Hell's ability to deploy forces against Earth, but the weaponry they had provided the Doom Slayer had directly lead to all three Deags being murdered with no substitute available. At this point it seemed almost certain that the harvest of Earth would be brought to a crashing halt, and with it the flow of Argent energy to Urdak would cease.

Within her armor, the Khan Maykr was frantically looking up information on her HUD, trying to find information on anything at all she could use to dispose of the interlopers. The Icon of Sin was still in Hell and therefore not yet deployable, she didn't trust her subjects any further than she could throw them once they were out of her range of influence, and going to deal with matters herself would be suicidal.

And so the Khan Maykr found herself helplessly watching as events unfolded.

* * *

(POV: Clockwork Knight Adamant)

With the Blood Ritual stopped, the only hell rifts remaining on Earth were the ones we were keeping open to maintain communication with ARC. We of course had plenty of forces Earthside still helping with mopping up the relatively few Demon and Cultist infestations, but the majority of our attention was devoted to hitting targets in Hell. In particular, we had learned that there was only one place where new Demons were made any faster than glacially slow natural formation, and the process required a constant influx of innocent victims to use for raw materials.

As soon as we had this knowledge, it was clear that there was only one acceptable course of action. Nekravol would have to be destroyed in its entirety and razed to Hell's cursed bedrock. Sadly we couldn't just nuke the place into a smoldering crater due to the vast numbers of innocent victims inside, but that just made us even more determined to see the mission through.

As such, the army we were deploying against Nekravol was comparable to the population of large European countries prior to Hell's invasion. We had eighty million Knights, almost ten million tankforms of various sorts, well over two hundred capital ships providing superheavy fire support, and eight million smaller fliers. We also had the Doom Slayer, as apparently the mythical demon killer in question had heard of our upcoming assault and had volunteered to be part of the action.

Through sheer happenstance I happened to be in the same infantry group as the Doom Slayer as we charged towards our destination. No words were spoken between us, and none needed to be. The defensive walls of Nekravol rose over the horizon, and before the Demons manning their defenses could react several hundred shots from various weapons lanced out to immediately demolish all of the city's heavy weapons platforms while also blasting a massive breach in the walls.

What followed was an unmitigated massacre. My fellow war machines (a category I felt safe including the Doom Slayer in) rampaged through the streets and corridors of Nekravol effectively unimpeded. Demons that crossed any of our paths were very quick to stop being theology and start being physics given the sheer volume of firepower we were putting out, so even though we mowed down literal millions of hellspawn they might as well have not even been there for all the resistance they provided.

The much harder part was freeing the captive humans here. Most of them were at the very least heavily traumatized, a significant portion were basically catatonic, around half of them were technically _dead_ , and getting them out would be a massive logistical nightmare. Fortunately the nightmare was eased somewhat by the use of pathway gates to make extraction about a million times easier than it would have been, but the point remained that there were a fuckload of innocent people that needed to be hauled to safety. And every Knight occupied with evacuating innocent people was a Knight _not_ available for frontline fighting. Given the sheer number of Demons here, that meant we were rapidly being bogged down.

We were only about halfway through clearing out the City of the Dead when three important announcements came over the tactical net. First was from the center of the city, and informed us that a machine had been located that didn't remotely fit with the rest of Nekravol's architecture. It was some sort of energy relay blasting a massive plume of hell energy through an interdimensional rift to elsewhere, and was built with white and gold thematics that could have been mistaken for Holy if you didn't have a thematograph telling you EXACTLY how evil the entire machine was. Guessing based on what Samuel Hayden had said, this was likely part of that deal the Maykrs had with Hell, so we readied several Pathway probes to be fired through the rift to Urdak to establish a beachhead.

The second message through the tactical net was that a Titan-class Demon wearing massive power armor had been seen walking towards Nekravol, apparently having been woken up by the fighting. The capital ships had pretty much immediately blasted it into an immobile semi-skeletal state, but between its regeneration, some sort of conceptual effect, and the fact that its power readings on the thematograph were growing geometrically, it was clear a more permanent solution was desperately needed.

Third was that all other Demonic forces in the area had apparently decided that a general retreat was the best course of action, fleeing from our army as fast as they could possibly travel. Many were gunned down as they fled, but plenty more escaped into the vast reaches of Hell to be hunted down later.

Immediately I turned to the Doom Slayer to query him about the Titan-class Demon, but it seemed that artificial intelligence in his suit had already filled him in since he was charging straight towards the nearest Pathway gate, which was already leading outside Nekravol.

As I followed, VEGA filled us all in "The Titan-Class Demon is the Icon of Sin. To disable it requires embedding a weapon into its brain capable of interfering with the energies sustaining it. Even then, the Icon of Sin will immediately revive if that weapon is removed."

I immediately thought of my active sword, but VEGA pre-empted my answer saying "Sadly that particular variety of weapon will be ineffective; the Holy/Unholy reaction will simply destroy tissue until the blade falls out and the Icon reanimates. If a Crucible blade were available it would be effective, but one is not readily available."

There was a brief pause as I caught a glimpse of the Doom Slayer coordinating efforts to keep the Icon incapacitated, before I said "Understood." and immediately placed a call to Doctor Samuel Hayden.

The cyborg answered almost immediately, and I wasted no time on small talk as I said "Hayden, we need a Crucible in Nekravol. Now. The Icon of Sin is loose and we can't keep it down permanently without something like that. You still have yours, yes?"

Doctor Hayden nodded as he agreed "Yes, we still have the Crucible in storage though it hasn't seen much use lately. I'll have it delivered to you immediately."

And so I got to feel all sorts of useless as we waited around for a good two minutes for Hayden to dig the Crucible out of wherever he'd stashed it and have it shipped to us by Pathway. Immediately, I dashed over to the Doom Slayer and called out "Here, use this!"

The Slayer simply nodded once as the baleful red glowing blade of the Crucible flashed into existence. Then they charged forwards, leapt onto the Icon's braincase, and plunged the sword in. Snapping the blade from its hilt as the Icon sank into an inert heap, he gave us all a thumbs up.

Then I asked "We've got a beachhead in the realm of the Maykrs. Want to come help us clean house of some bargainers?"

The way the Doom Slayer almost vibrated with excitement was more than enough of an answer.


	22. Earth Bet 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which escalation occurs.

(POV: Muon Battleship Catherine)

The false angel exploding marked my complete and total dominance of the orbitals. Which meant that I now had the opportunity to turn my attention to what was going on planet-side. First thing's first, scan the broadcast media and tap their computer networks to figure out what had been going on while I hadn't been looking. First thing's first, nice to know that I'd managed to save most of the people caught in the blast that leveled Toronto. Also magic was spreading, which boded very well for the defense efforts. And also apparently the leader of the PRT had been complicit in ordering the nuclear strike and had been arrested.

That's... a lot to unpack. Also I had better clarify who I was before anyone freaked out about me blowing up an angel in orbit. So I fired up my transmitters, activated Words of Truth, and spoke.

**"I am Muon Battleship Catherine, formerly Clockwork Knight Catherine. I was able to survive the nuclear attack on Toronto by overloading my Blink unit to teleport my critical systems into deep space. I have since constructed this new battleship-pattern chassis out of muon matter to ensure that there will not be a repeat offense. The apparent angel I destroyed was an autonomous weapon of the extradimensional threat which would have used mind control and predictive modeling to sow discord and paranoia among you while also sabotaging large-scale efforts to deal with the problem. That is not likely to be an issue, as I have been very thorough in killing it, and even if a replacement is fabricated I will dispose of it just as readily. I will also be disposing of the two remaining autonomous weapons, designated Behemoth and Leviathan. This planet is now under MY protection, and I will NOT fail again. Signing off."**

Next priority was locking down dimensional travel completely. Or it _would_ have been if it weren't for the other two autonomous weapons. Given its location near the Earth's core the one the locals called Behemoth would simply cause a brief uptick in volcanic activity if detonated via dimensional jamming beam. However, disposing of Leviathan in the same way would be foolhardy in the extreme due to the massive tsunamis they would produce when they exploded from destabilization. Fortunately now that I knew how to kill Endbringers doing it again wouldn't be too much trouble.

Case in point, teleporting to Leviathan's current location, grabbing him with a Mana tether, dragging it through pseudo-space, and popping it with a dimensional jamming field was the work of only a couple minutes. This meant that the only remaining Endbringer was Behemoth, and as mentioned it was no longer in a situation Now that doing so wouldn't immediately set off a global catastrophe, the next thing on the agenda was launching an array of massive dimensional jammer satellites to form a shell a thousand kilometers up. The way the geometry worked out with regard to the inverse square law meant that the intensity of the jamming field would increase the further towards the center of the shell someone went.

This meant that as the shell was constructed, Behemoth got exposed to progressively more and more intense jamming. A few seismometer probes made it possible to detect when the Endbringer destabilized, providing me with my first actual hard data on the dimensional jamming intensity needed to detonate one of the extradimensional threat's autonomous weapons.

Now that dimensional travel was shut down, there were still some important things that needed doing. First and foremost, there were several regions of Earth Bet where civil society had broken down completely in favor of Parahuman warlordism, or where the current state of affairs would otherwise lead to a bloodbath as soon as the powers got turned off. Case in point, Africa. By all accounts the place had descended into the worst sort of feudal society, where powerful Parahumans effectively ruled with impunity. Similarly, the situation in the Balkans, the Middle East, and a significant portion of South America had deteriorated to the point where immediate intervention was required to put a stop to the suffering experienced by the locals.

So the next item on the agenda was getting Knights to anywhere they would be needed. Which was pretty much everywhere. As such I immediately began launching deployment pods full of newly-made Knights from my missile tubes to get them wherever they needed to go. After a few dozen salvos we had full coverage of all the highest priority spots, meaning that the next place where we'd be deploying Knights was the moon. We needed an operating base to start interdimensional probing efforts from, and there was no way whatsoever that we'd be doing that on Earth and risk the safety of everyone living there.  
  
Then my train of thought was rudely interrupted by a warning that the sun was showing signs of being about to go nova.  
Oh.

* * *

(POV: Eidolon)

The feeling of his powers cutting off filled David with a deep sense of dread. This was what he had been fearing for years, all his agency and power deserting him after weakening. And now that could be achieved at the flip of a switch, thanks to those accursed dimensional jammer units that Clockwork had spread the plans for. Slowly, he turned to see the group of FBI agents approaching with their briefcase-sized jammer unit in tow.  
  
The agents barely had time to shout "You're under arrest for-" before David was sprinting away, dashing around corners and through alleyways to try and get enough distance from the jammer for his powers to come back online. As he ran, David cursed himself for not having learned any magic while he wasn't under suspicion. Ever since Toronto it should have been obvious that the days of Parahuman powers being the be-all end-all of superhuman capabilities were numbered, but he'd completely ignored that until Alexandria was arrested.

So now David ran for his life, the sounds of the FBI close behind him. Then the unthinkable happened: David tripped. There weren't even any obstructions, just perfectly smooth pavement, and yet David tripped. Mere seconds later the FBI agents were upon him, and David felt the handcuffs binding his wrists together.  
  
Then the agent started talking, and David couldn't help but groan internally as the man said "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attourney. If you cannot afford to hire an attourney, one will be appointed for you. If you decide to answer questions now, you can stop talking at any time."

* * *

(POV: Scion)  
  
[DISCONNECTION]

[CONFUSION]

[INACCESSIBLE]

[ANGER/PANIC]

[UNACCEPTABLE]

[ELIMINATE]

[DETONATION]


End file.
